The previous chapter mentioned our tendency to derive or extract ideas from what presents itself to us in our surroundings. Now let's look at another aspect of our interaction with our surroundings - our tendency to project human qualities into the things that are in it.
People, you may have noticed, have a seemingly inexhaustible propensity to project human characteristics onto objects around them that aren't human. It almost goes without saying that we anthropomorphize animals, especially pets such as cats and dogs and any baby creatures that look in the slightest bit cute.
We also anthropomorphize creatures with which the empathic link seems much more tenuous or even nonexistent. Insects are a good example. We endow these arthropods with personalities far beyond the capabilities of their few brain cells - you won't be alone if you've thought that ladybirds are friendly, adorable little things while cockroaches are creatures that have just crawled up from the domain of Hades.
When we project a personality onto an animal we take for granted the fact that we are bestowing the creature with a degree of mental capability or consciousness from which this personality can arise. That's perhaps understandable. However, we also have the seemingly odd habit of projecting human-like personalities onto completely inert and inanimate objects too, in which mental capability is patently nonexistent.
Children have an innate tendency to give human personalities to their toys. You undoubtedly did it as a child yourself with your dolls (if you were a girl) or your killer robots from the planet Zarg (if you were a boy). Of course dolls and robots are human-like toys that are specifically designed to have personalities projected onto them - usually one appropriate to the gender of the person playing with them - however children project personality onto many other toys too, such as plastic dumper trucks and bikes. Maybe there's no point in playing with most toys unless they have been assigned personalities.
The act of projecting personality onto these inert objects means that we endow them with a degree of consciousness - not dissimilar to the way that we endow creatures such as ladybirds, cockroaches and pet guinea pigs with consciousness. Indeed, how can a toy railway engine with a face painted on the front of it, called Thomas, not be in possession of consciousness? As maturity eclipses our childish ways we stop seeing toys as semi-sentient entities and transfer our anthropomorphic projections onto grown-up objects instead.
Such as cars.
It's possibly not an accident that the fronts of cars look vaguely like faces (and is it just me, or are they being designed to look more aggressive these days?).
Some people even giving their own car a name.
Sometimes, when a car (particularly one with a name) refuses to start for some reason the owner may feel that the vehicle is acting up because it hasn't been treated with the respect and love that it deserves. The car has gone into a huff.
Personally, I don't have a car that's got a personality (or a name), but I do have a computer that's very temperamental. I often curse it under my breath (which I suspect it hears, thus encouraging it to become even more stroppy).
People have probably projected personality and consciousness onto the things around them, both animate and inanimate, since the dawn of the human race. For instance, you can well imagine a primitive human, tending a fruit tree in the early, tentative days of agriculture, establishing a "relationship" with the tree. And you can imagine how, if the tree were to fail to produce fruit one year, the person caring for the tree would possibly explain it as being because he or she must have offended the tree in some way.
As well as our propensity to project human-like consciousness into nonhuman objects we also have an almost irresistible tendency to see the shapes of humans (and of other living things) where they don't exist.
Look at clouds for instance. Only the day before I wrote these words I saw a cloud that looked so much like a human head that it could hardly be a coincidence. There was a perfect chin, mouth, nose, prominent brow and wonderfully bouffant hairstyle. Then I looked at another cloud and amazingly saw another head (although not quite as perfect as the previous one, I have to admit). Then another! It seemed as though the clouds were gathering for a convention. Interestingly, although I could see lots of clouds that looked like human heads, I could see none that looked like human feet or other anatomical extremities. One of the clouds had a head that looked suspiciously like a rhinoceros. Why, I don't know.
Not only did the clouds look like heads, they also looked angry and threatening - they had personalities. Later that day they rained all over me - they were callous.
We see human and animal forms in all sorts of objects, and thus we give those objects a degree of semi-consciousness - even clouds (which can be angry and callous as I've just mentioned, but which can also be quite pleasant, in a light and fluffy sort of way). On top of this we also see human and animal forms in visual environments where there is nothing more to be perceived than a random conglomeration of colours and shapes, where no real object of any type exists at all. We see animal and human forms in the random splatters of Rorschach inkblot tests such as the one in Figure 17. In these tests a symmetrical shape is formed by folding a piece of paper on to a blob of wet ink, which spreads the ink out in haphazard directions - the interpretation of this random blot by the viewer is supposedly a clue to their psychological make-up. What do you make of Figure 17? It's some sort of man-insect, isn't it?
The same detection of nonexistent animal and human forms frequently happens with abstract paintings. This can be an irritating problem for the painters of such works, who often find that the carefully crafted and deliberately non-representational forms that they have created are transformed in the minds of the audience into humans, animals or birds.
I, along with a fair number of other people, have a tendency to see the heads of giant insects when I look at certain types of kitchen tap. Fortunately I find insects fascinating, so as a result I find taps fascinating too. Look at the tap in Figure 18. If that's not some sort of weird giant insect head I don't know what it is.
And here's the whole insect, just to prove it.
Although it's animals' heads that are most commonly discerned in objects (such as taps), whole animals can sometimes be observed. I have an ironing board which when folded flat could easily be mistaken for a gargantuan cockroach squatting up against the wall. Insects again. The ironing board is very rarely used, so spends most of its time leaning in the corner looking disturbing. (It isn't only me who sees the ironing board as a cockroach, thankfully, so you can't accuse me of some sort of personality disorder here. Or maybe I should be more careful when choosing friends.) In the same way that we tend to give animals human-like personality traits (such as thinking that ladybirds are nice), when we see animal forms in inanimate objects such as taps or ironing boards we give those objects human-like personality traits too. Which is why my ironing board is sinister - if only it looked more like a ladybird than a cockroach. Perhaps a cheery red and black spotted cover would do the trick.
So it is that due to our tendency to see animal and human forms almost everywhere we look, in the clouds, on the front of our cars, in kitchen taps, we find ourselves totally surrounded by objects onto which we project human-like personality - and from there, by extension, human-like consciousness.
Have you ever been on the coast at a spot where cliffs drop down into the sea, where some of the cliffs protrude out into the ocean creating ranks of separate headlands? It's often easy to see the jagged profiles of human faces in such cliffs, the faces gazing eternally out across the water. Maybe that's why they are called headlands.
It's tempting to imagine that the cliffs are somehow acting as sentinels, perhaps keeping a lookout for storms caused by the angry and callous clouds that I mentioned earlier.
The cliffs actually seem to have some sort of consciousness. But why stop there? It's not hard to imagine that if cliffs can have consciousness then surely, by extension, the very Earth itself can have consciousness too. Perhaps everything has consciousness.
The notion of endowing the whole world of non-living things with consciousness is a feature of animistic or shamanistic philosophies, which we in the western world tend to associate with "primitive" peoples. However the tendency is closer to the way that we see things than we sometimes care to acknowledge. The consciousness that's presumed to be possessed by non-human entities such as trees and cliffs is given a name other than consciousness, so that the whole idea doesn't sound too odd - it's given the name spirit. Thus it's possible to conceive of trees as being the harbourers of tree spirits, cliffs of cliff spirits, the ground of earth spirits, rivers of river spirits and so on.
The whole idea sounds as though it has a definite element of the supernatural to it. However it doesn't have to be so.
We presume that there's a supernatural aspect because in English the word spirit is frequently used in the context of the otherworldly (as in referring to ghosts as spirits, the spirit world, the Holy Spirit, or indeed anything that's spiritual).
But the word can also be applied to things that are as familiar as the human spirit or even high spirits. The word has a very wide spectrum of meanings, and herein lies a potential trap.
As soon as the word spirit is applied to something non-human such as a river or a rock the meaning is cut loose from its anchor and can slide from one part of the spectrum of meaning to another. A river that started out as possessing something akin to consciousness can end up with the properties of a super-natural entity, simply because the same word is used for both.
So it is that the natural can easily slip into the supernatural.
I'll come back to this, and the implications of the mobile meanings of concepts such as spirit later.
The imprecision of meaning of the word spirit can, amongst other things, cause misunderstandings in translation between languages. For instance, if a primitive animistic people's word for the consciousness that a tree supposedly possesses is translated as "spirit" it's automatically assumed that there is a religious dimension to their attitude to trees, where there may indeed be none. A world-view may be mistranslated into a religious view.
Why do we see the shapes of people and animals where there aren't any: in inkblots, in clouds, in cliffs, in taps? It could be because our brains are wired to prioritise human and animal forms in the visual environment. Basically, we're obsessed with such forms. Our brains devote a huge amount of circuitry to the recognition of them, with a special emphasis being put on human faces. Here's an explanation of how our brains do it, followed by the reason why they bother.
Firstly, it's important to realise that the brain doesn't see the world around it simply as though the scene was projected onto a cinema screen on the inside of your skull. Before a scene can be observed "in your head" it has to be broken down into a number of different components for processing, and these components then have to be recombined into the meaningful form that we call "an image". Amongst other things, the scene is broken down into its different colours - red, green and blue - in a way that's analogous to the manner in which a television image or magazine photograph is broken down into tiny dots of primary colours (which are too small to be noticed individually when we look at them, but which when seen collectively give the impression of a continuous full colour image). However, unlike TV and magazine images, the image that we see with our eyes is broken down not only into separate colour components but into other components too. It is, rather incredibly, deconstructed into component parts such as horizontal lines, vertical lines, circles and so on. Each of these component parts is sent to a separate area of the brain for processing, with the different components of the scene only merging again when they are unified into what you perceive as the image.
The degree to which the scene that constitutes the outside world is split into separate components for processing is quite surprising. Not only are horizontal lines sent to a different part of the brain to vertical lines, but lines that are at 30 degrees, 45 degrees, 60 degrees and so on go to their own individual areas too, and even movement is processed in its own discrete areas of the brain by its own dedicated brain cells.
The separate areas of the brain that are used for processing different types of visual information can be detected by the use of brain scanning techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This technique works by probing the brain with the use of powerful magnetic fields. Areas of the brain that are busy processing data have higher blood flow than other areas, and this increased flow is detected by the scanner and shows up as light areas (Figure 20 shows an artist's impression of such a scan).
The resulting image has something of the Rorschach test about it, don't you think? Perhaps you can deduce the personality of the brain's owner from it.
When the person whose brain is being scanned is looking at a horizontal line a particular part of the brain lights up, and when looking at a vertical line a different part lights up. And so on.
If a person suffers brain damage to an area of the brain that deals with a particular type of visual information the ability to process that information may be impaired. For instance if the region that deals with horizontal lines is damaged, horizontal lines may drop out of the final image, while vertical ones and angled ones are still seen with no problem. Thus a person with this condition may be unable to see horizontal objects such as bookshelves but be able to see the books that are resting on them because their spines are vertical.
If you have trouble visualising this selective blindness and you think that it sounds too bizarre to be true, bear in mind that each of your own eyes is selectively blind already, with its own blind spot - an area that is blind to everything - just off to one side of the centre of vision.
This blind spot is caused because there is a portion of the retina at the back of your eye that has no light detecting sensors, due to the fact that the area is occupied by the "cable" that takes the visual information away from your eye and into your brain.
If you're not familiar with the blind spot, here is how to notice its presence - by staring at Figure 21.
Close your left eye and look at the hat in the figure using only your right eye. Slowly move the page closer to or further from your eye, at a distance somewhere in the region of half an arm's length, while you stare at the hat. At some point you'll notice that the rabbit vanishes, as though by magic. This is because the part of your retina that should be seeing the rabbit is occupied by your blind spot.
As well as having areas that process basic components of images such as angled lines and colours, the brain has areas that process more complex forms that are particularly significant. Here in Figure 22 is a shape that you'll process in such an area.
Yes, it's a human face.
But of course, it isn't a human face at all: it's just an ellipse with a couple of dots on it. The brain overrides this obvious fact, with the consequence that it takes a real effort not to see the image as a face. The brain seems to contain something similar to a standardized face template, and any object or form that exhibits the basic ingredients of a face will have its shape shunted off to the face recognition part of the brain. Notice how the shapes in Figure 23 on the next page aren't automatically interpreted as faces, even though their components are exactly the same as those in Figure 22 apart from their positions.
When it comes to seeing human faces, the "face recognition software" in our brains is so powerful that not only can we recognise the general shape of faces instantly, but we can also differentiate between millions of different individual real faces when we come across them. This ability is quite amazing, and is extremely useful in the modern world with its teaming millions-too-many people. Its power is quite intriguing however, due to the fact that when this ability was first developed it must have seemed almost like overkill, as in pre-modern times you'd be lucky if you ever had the need to differentiate between a few hundred individual faces at most..
If the part of the brain that is used for analysing individual faces is damaged it becomes impossible to recognise people from their facial appearance. Sufferers can't recognise their own friends and families, or sometimes even their own reflections. This condition is known as face blindness, or prosopagnosia.
As a result of the mass of face recognition software that it comes bundled with, the brain is rather over-enthusiastic in seeking out faces, so it frequently sees them where there aren't any. In other words, it makes a lot of mistakes.
I realise that "making mistakes" isn't as poetic or romantic a reason for seeing faces everywhere as some readers may wish for. However it's because of its very mundanity and blandness that I suspect that it's probably right. Mundanity generally trumps poeticalness on the principle that if an explanation for anything has an excessively positive or pleasing feel to it one should be suspicious of it on the grounds that it's got the dubious whiff of wishful thinking about it.
The type of mistake that the brain makes when it sees a face where there isn't one is called the generation of a false positive. A false positive occurs when you think that you've made a positive identification of something, but you were mistaken.
Generating false positives is a different type of mistake to the type that you make as a result of carelessness, such as tripping over your shoelaces or forgetting your partner's birthday. False positives are often a necessary consequence of the need to provide a safety margin when making quick identifications.
Here's a typical example of the generation of a false positive, taken from the world of modern domestic gadgetry.
You may be familiar with the movement-activated porch lights that people sometimes install outside their houses. The light should only turn itself on when a person approaches the door, but if the sensor is too sensitive the circuitry will click into action whenever anything that moves, such as a hedgehog, wanders into the range of the device. This over-sensitivity to movement creates the false positive - the light clicking on for a hedgehog. But generally speaking it's better for the light to turn on at these unnecessary times than to not turn on when it is needed. Over-sensitivity is preferable to under-sensitivity.
Why do we need to be over-sensitive to human faces, and to therefore generate false positives of them everywhere we go? Imagine this scenario. You're a prehistoric hunter-gatherer, foraging for berries in a forest. Unbeknownst to you, there's another human lurking nearby, peering at you through a gap in the foliage. For humans, as with many other species of animal, a major source of danger is aggression from members of the same species, with the aggression usually related to issues of territory or reproduction. (The idea that most species other than humans live in harmony with other members of their own species is a romantic myth.) As a result it's very important to be able to pick out the form of a human face from amongst the chaos of shapes and shadows in a typical forest setting. You never know when an enemy, or at least a rival, may be lurking nearby. Making a positive identification of a lurking person is so important that it's necessary for us to be over-sensitive to shapes that resemble the human face and to thus see faces where they aren't - just to be on the safe side. A false positive, or a false alarm, is better than being caught unawares by an enemy. (And an enemy was, unfortunately for our prehistoric ancestors, almost anyone who wasn't in the same kin group or tribe.) We also tend to see the shapes of animals when we look around us, because animals are possibly the second most important things that we need to recognise, after people. I recently saw a broken branch from a tree floating in a large pond and could have sworn that it was a crocodile (right down to its eyes and mouth), which surprised me enormously because such creatures are extremely rare in the parks of north London.
I think you'll agree though that it's generally safer to mistake a broken branch for a crocodile than to mistake a crocodile for a broken branch.
Similarly, I expect that it's better to mistake an ironing board that's leaning against my kitchen wall for a giant cockroach than it is to mistake a giant cockroach for an ironing board.
So it is that we see human faces and animal forms all around us - in the clouds, in the trees, in the rocks and in everyday household appliances.
As I outlined earlier, once we've recognised a hint of the human or the animal in an inanimate object such as a floating log or a kitchen tap it's easy to invest the object with a degree of consciousness. As I also mentioned earlier, once you've given things like clouds and cliffs consciousness it's then a small step to giving almost everything else on Earth consciousness too, eventually allowing the whole of nature to possess the quality.
And why stop there? While we're busy attributing consciousness to just about everything that we can see in the natural world is it any wonder that when we ponder on what may be hidden behind the natural world we invest that with consciousness as well, simply by extending the tendency? As a result we imagine presences that are imbued with human-like personality and consciousness at work beyond the physical world. Due to the fact that they are hidden they are often referred to as being metaphysical in their nature (or beyond the physical).
These metaphysical presences can easily be thought of as being quite powerful, given their position. In our minds they are thus elevated from the ranks of spirits (which can be our equals but that just happen to reside in trees, rivers and cars rather than in human heads) to the ranks of super-spirits, or gods.
Thus it is that we imagine the forces behind nature as being conscious very much in the manner that we are - in other words we imagine them in our own, human, image.
With the monotheistic religions of Judism, Christianity and Islam it can be argued that we've even managed to fashion a single god in our own image and then we've declared that it was actually this god who fashioned us in his image - a wonderful example of the bestowing, or projection, of our own personality traits and preoccupations onto something else.
Almost all of humanity, in all of its disparate forms around the world, has this tendency to see various types of consciousness at work behind the immediate physical world (although not always in such an elevated form as we assume, as I mentioned in the description of spirits earlier, on page 55). The very fact that practically everybody does this may be taken to indicate that there must be something in it, something valid about this tendency and some rightness in the conclusions that it evokes. Surely the universality of it is evidence that it contains some truth - a sort of mass endorsement of its correctness.
While you're thinking about that, I'd like you to try your hand at a simple puzzle that will be relevant to the next point that I want to make (so don't skip it).
Above, in Figure 24, are four cards- similar to playing cards.
Each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other.
What you have to work out is which two cards you would have to turn over in order to verify whether or not the following statement is true.
The statement is "If a card has a 4 on one side, it has a Z on the other." Easy. Remember your answer, which we'll come back to in a moment. In the meantime, back to the main thrust of this chapter.
From what I said earlier, it could be argued that when pondering the nature of the universe, coming up with the concept of a human-like god or gods as being what's behind it all seems to be the intuitive and obvious answer. "What other answer could there be?" people might ask. "It just seems right". Or they may say "It seems improbable, but nothing like as improbable as the alternatives." It's either god/gods or nothing. What's more, the vast majority of people agree on it.
But because an answer seems intuitive or obvious, or because most people believe it, doesn't necessarily mean that it's right.
Take the answer to the card puzzle that you (hopefully) did just now.
Did you come up with the answer 4 and Z? About three quarters of people do.
So you're in good company in getting it wrong.
The correct answer is in fact 4 and X.
Here's why.
The statement that you were asked to consider stated that if there is a 4 on one side of a card then there is a Z on the other. It doesn't mention that a Z has to have a 4 on the other side - just that a 4 has to have a Z - the Z can have any number on the reverse.
However, you need to check that the X doesn't have a 4 on the other side. A 4 on one side and an X on the other proves that the statement is false, because a 4 has to have a Z.
This puzzle is known as the Wason card test, devised in 1966 by the cognitive psychologist Peter Wason, an expert on the psychology of human reasoning.
It illustrates a situation where what seems to be the obvious and self-evident answer is in fact wrong.
If you got the answer wrong you were thinking the way that most people think (and if you got it right there's always the chance that you may have done so because you suspected that the puzzle was a trick, so you devoted extra care and attention to the problem. Or of course you might just be very clever).
Just imagine the situation if you decided to determine the correct answer to this puzzle simply by adding up and comparing the different answers that people gave. By shear weight of numbers the usual, wrong, conclusion would be the incontrovertible winner and would be proclaimed as being the correct answer.
There are implications here for subjects beyond card puzzles.
Take the existence of conscious forces at work behind the scenes in the natural world for instance.
To many people the existence of such forces is an obvious, self-evident truth. The fact that most other people agree with this reinforces the assumption that it's true. But as the Wason card test illustrates, just because most people instinctively come to a particular answer doesn't mean that it is necessarily correct.
Just as the puzzle of the Wason card test usually invokes the wrong conclusion, so perhaps the puzzle of what lies behind life, the universe and everything usually invokes the wrong conclusion too. Simply because most people feel that there's a metaphysical force at work there doesn't actually make it so.
