Ancient animistic beliefs live on in our intimacy with tech

Ancient animistic beliefs live on in our intimacy with tech

Stephen T Asma

Recently, science has come to understand the emotions of social bonding, and I think it helps us understand why it’s so easy to fall into these ‘as-if intimacies’ with things. Care or bonding is a function of oxytocin and endorphin surging in the brain when you spend time with another person, and it’s best when it’s mutual and they’re feeling it too. Nonhuman animals bond with us because they have the same brain chemistry process. But the system also works fine when the other person doesn’t feel it – and it even works fine when the other person isn’t even a ‘person’. You can bond with things that cannot bond back. Our emotions are not very discriminating and we imprint easily on anything that reduces the feeling of loneliness. But I think there’s a second important ingredient to understanding our relationship with tech.

The proliferation of devices is certainly amplifying our tendency for anthropomorphism, and many influential thinkers claim that this is a new and dangerous phenomenon, that we’re entering into a dehumanising ‘artificial intimacy’ with gadgets, algorithms and interfaces. I respectfully disagree. What’s happening now is not new, and it’s more interesting than garden-variety alienation. We are returning to the oldest form of human cognition – the most ancient pre-scientific way of seeing the world: animism.

Let's understand that tech replicates organic conduct, and delivers 'magical' outcomes. We use tech to 're-animate' our reality. We are driven by a passion for AI - to restore the sense of living in a many tongued reality. The city dweller has created the many eyes of the forest in CCTV. We may doubt the motive of then human actors in this replication but the deep motive is still the same. 

There is a difference between awareness and intelligence. And if we understand that we understand the animistic sense of knowing, as Thales is said to have put it 'everything is full of gods'. If consciousness is the foundation of our being, then all things have consciousness to some degree. When we add out tech to the equation we create connections that were once solely the province of psi and magic. 

You have to be of a certain age to fully get the visceral nature of this reality. What makes us conscious of difference is knowing when things were not as they are. There was a time when you could not see and speak to a person in real time even thought they were on the other side of the country -and neither you nor they were connected in any evident manner. 

The ancient animists did not, could not, imagine they lived in a reality not filled with spirit. For them our modern notion of objective materialism was beyond imagination.