On Anthropomorphism and Narrativity

Anthropomorphism as an essential element in narratives

There are many cognitive elements which are a necessary condition for creating narratives. Understanding of the concept time, for example, is an essential cognitive process underlying the plot aspect of narratives, and so is agenting, and cause and effect. All these are necessary for creating a narrative and understanding it.

But there is one more aspect which is essential for narrating: Anthropomorphism.

We have seen that narratives have to have, as a minimum, a plot and a protagonist. The protagonist would always be anthropomorphised, always in a form of a person. This happens even when the protagonist is an object, and animal, or even a concept. This happens because in order for someone or something to become a protagonist, it has to 'put on', as it were, a human form, to be personified, to be presented as a person, to “anthropomorphise”.

About the concept Anthropomorphism

It is usually thought that “anthropomorphism” means assigning a human form to a god, and thus it is a heresy, or so it is conceived in the monotheistic-philosophic religions known as Abrahamic religions.

(note: In fact, not only in the Abrahamic religions one finds invisible principle; such is found in other religions, such as Buddhism, Hindu religions in their philosophical incarnation, and others. In fact, in the Abrahamic religions themselves, especially Judaism and Christianity (Islam is stricter in this respect) god is portrayed as having a human form in many stages of the religion: Jesus, for example, obviously has a human form, as well as God the Father in many ancient, Medieval and modern artworks. Biblical religion, a forerunner of rabbinic Judaism, has no hesitation speaking of God in humanized terms, and rabbinic culture itself, in its midrashic aspect, has no fear of anthropomorphism as well.)

But in fact the meaning of the word “anthropomorphism” is simple “human form”, and this attribute can be assigned to a whole range of things, not only to god. Landscape, animals, trees, objects – all these can assume human form, or given attributes which are considered human, such as understanding, feeling, agenting or speaking.

I don't claim here that these attributes (such as agenting or speaking) are truly only human, but these are considered often as human qualities, especially speaking.

 

Speech and personification

All this is particularly typical to the ability to speak, and therefore assigning speaking ability to an object, an animal, or a concept (God) is considered anthropomorphism.

The origin of this, in Western thinking, is the Aristotelian hierarchial chain of being, which puts men at the top of the hierarchy of objects-plants-animals-humans.

I don't claim that this hierarchy is true in any way, only that we tend of think that human language is the most developed.

Anthropomorphic Cognition

So Anthropomorphism is the assigning of what is considered human qualities of things which are not human. A set of cognitive activities which translates the reality into a world that pertains to or centers around humanized things will be called in this book “anthropomorphic cognition”.

In order to understand more clearly what anthropomorphic cognition means, it is worthwhile to look at other types of cognition, and what type of ontology is perceived by them.

For this purpose I will describe three other types of cognition: Mimetic, theoretic, and emotional.

After describing these cognitions, I will return to discuss the relationship between narrativity and anthropomorphism.

What Religion Is

Today we had a good session in the research seminar that I coordinate aimed at writing an article in which we show the benefits of the Decoupling Theory for the study of religion.
Alexandra presented a case study in which she talked about the heritage of Romanticism in our modern discourses, in particular in the representation of the data collected by the Hubble telescope.

Again the discussion landed (for some time) on the question of what religion is, and as always it was a heated discussion, because we find problematic even the category of 'religion', let alone knowing what is the content of this concept.

I remembered how easily Yuval Harari talks about religion, its role as a cohesive force in the society (talking about the narratives of religion only), how the present religion is humanism, how buddhism is not a religion etc., as if this concept has a very clear meaning. His claim is that humanism is the religion of our days.

I also want to call into attention (yes, your attention) what Barend said two meetings ago, which happen to be EXACTLY what I am teaching in my culture and cognition course, that religion directs the person into what he should believe, away from experiencing reality (actuality, as he calls it) into the culturally accepted repertoire.
When I teach it I call it Seal of the Semiosphere; this expression refers to God as the ultimate confirmator of the culture. But Barend's approach, which I second, goes back to what my mother told me about religion, which is: Religion is the social institution that takes the authority of confirming what the semiosphere is.
She did not use these words, but her definition, or description of what religion is, certainly started with the words "Religion is a social institution", this is to say - not an organization, but an institute.
So instead of relating to the content of religion, while trying to define it, relating to its role seems to make more sense, and end up in using the concept 'religion' in an analytic manner. Even cultures that don't have 'religion' as a separate social organization, have this function of a seal, a 'shtemple' confirming what our culture actually is.
To be sure the socialization and the message of what the culture is, is given by many parts of the society, starting with parents, kindergarten teachers, friends, dr. Phils etc., and they cannot all be called 'religion'. But when there is an institution that does this (the confirmation, I mean), it is religion, or can be called religion.

Narratives We Live By - Self, Society, and Cosmos in Human Cognition

The aim of this book is to study the place of narratives in human cognition. It searches for the motivation for creating narratives, and the type of cognition that narratives both create and represent. Narrating reality is a way of presenting people with a meaningful self and a meaningful environment. There are other ways of representing reality, other types of cognition which makes the environment meaningful, but the narrative one bears a certain character which makes it unique; the uniqueness of narrative cognition is in its use of anthropomorphism, its use of the person, anthropos, human, as a focal point, around whom events are happening, and thus presenting reality in 'human size', so to speak.

In the first stage we will study why humans tell stories, to recognize which problem is solved by telling stories. I will then seek the neural and cognitive mechanisms which enable the representing of reality as a story. The major part of the book is dedicated to looking at major narrative humans live by, narratives about self, society, and the cosmos, both ancient and modern.

Stories and Realities

I loved to listen to stories. Any story.
For example the one about the two sisters that went to pick mushroom in the field.
While the younger was picking them on the rails, the train approached.
Will she be saved?
How?
Oh, gosh, wise it was of her to duck down and wait for the train to pass.
I would have probably done the same.

Or, the famous story of Cinderella.
The prince went looking for her, trying her glass shoe on all the young women in the kingdom, but they fit only the feet of Cinderella.
How can this be?
Can a pair of shoes only fit one person in the whole country?
In the shoe-store one pair fits the feet of many many girls, so what was it about those glass shoes? (and while we are at it, these shoes must have been made from a very thick glass, otherwise they would have been broken by the weight of Cinderella when she walked in them).

There must be some explanation for this somewhere, but even as it is, the story is very very nice.

If you asked me whether Cinderella really existed, or the fairy who made it all possible for her, I would have probably said that they didn't – after a certain age.
But while listening to the story, the reality of it is overwhelming and is experienced as reality.
That is – if we are experienced in the process of inhibiting a reality-check initiated by the brain.

But reality check knows not to push itself forward too much. After all, it restricts itself on a daily basis, when we, for example, believe that there is a real person at the end of the chain telling us the news on television (after all, there is a bunch of jumping colored dots to prove it), or that Steve Jobs, even though dead now, created an economic empire by inventing first the Apple computer, and then a whole industry of electronics (after all, I have an Apple computer under my fingertips to prove his [past] existence*).

So things that are perceived by the senses here and now and recognized as reality, are in fact, being contested by realities that reside in our brain, in our memory.

How are brain-realities created? stories, in the very wide sense of the word, are one of the most common ways.

* Actually, it is a Toshiba, but Apple fit better in the story.

On Personification of Inanimate Objects

The brain has the ability to differentiate action from event. That is - a happening that results from an intention of an agent (a stone thrown by someone), and something that happens without anyone intending it (a rock rolling from a mountain). This knowledge is based on the ToM (Theory of Mind) knowledge, that the other is another individual with the ability to act on her own knowledge. Many animals have a ToM, and many differentiate action from event.
This recognition has a very obvious advantage in survival: if someone throws a stone at me, I should realize that there is an enemy around who should be faced (fight), avoided (flight), or tricked away (freeze). It is also obvious that the bias should be defaulted as  action, that is, one is better off mistaking a happening for an action that an event, because if we mistakenly think the stone was an action, i.e. thrown by an enemy, all we loose is some unnecessary fight movements, while if we mistake it for an event we might loose our life.
The bias to over-assign TOM to things comes to the fore very often in narratives. We find it in modern and ancient stories, in our everyday speech, and we make a point of telling it to our children. It is surprising how ofter we find in children books inanimate objects that speak, feel, and interact among themselves and with animals or humans. If asked, we tend to say that it is 'natural' for the children to think of objects as minded-entities, but this, in fact, is not true. Children, as many other mammals, have the natural ability to differentiate objects and people.

What is it, then, that we do when we present the inanimate world to our children as a "human(ized) society"?

It is an act of semiosis, of endowing perception with meaning. By personifying a tree, a stone, or a cat, we signal to our children that these are important, as important as humans. This is called 'costly signaling', and it makes sure our children know to include these object in their semiosphere, as they are also embedded in ours. We teach them to recognize and be attendant to trees and animals, sea, wind, and sun.



(picture from: http://www.dumbening.com/RSS/7-1-07.html)

Review of an article: ToM and Religion (not so great, but with a positive conclusion)

Boyd, Jeffrey H., “Have We Found the Holy Grail? Theory of Mind as a Unifying Construct”, Journal of Religion and Health 47:3 (2008) 366-385

The answer of this article is 'yes', and it intends to show how ToM (the ability to know what another person intends to do) is a unifying theory, i.e. can explain phenomena which look unconnected in first sight.

I will ignore the low register of the English in this article, and the few typos which I found, and relate to the content only.

The first thing that disturbed me was the religious point of view that was implicit in the article. Implicit – not because it was not noticed, it was very much noticed, but because it was taken for granted. Here are two examples:

p. 377: “We are also awestruck with the magnificence of the world, the cornucopia of life, and we year to give thanks for being alive.”; where on earth did this come from? I thought we are finding ourselves in a rat-race and whenever we have a minute to breath we ponder on the question 'who needs all this?'

Same page: “This article proposes that spirituality arose because ToM brings with it existential problems that can only be solved spiritually. Another way to say it would be that the Spirit made man/woman in his/her/its own image (genesis 1:27).

Boyd connects the mirror neurons theory to ToM theory in the following steps:

1. I can copy what you do because the same mirror neurons fire in my brain

2. I can simulate your behaviour, even without your doing it, because I know how I would do it.

3. I know what you are about to do, because if I were doing what you do, then the next thing I would do would be X.

4. I can infer your intention, because if I were doing what you are doing, then my goal would be X.

5. the fourth step already infers ToM.

Step 2 seems a bit 'in the air'; there seems to be a step missing here - if I am mirroring, how can I 'mirror' something that you are not doing?
* Disclosure: I do believe that I know what the 'step' is, it is the 'decoupling' aspect of human brain, but this belongs to a future post.

Another brain analysis which is not convincing in this article (p. 372): “After all, how can you impute goals and purpose to someone else, unless you are able to put that into words (Miller 2006)?” - is he quoting Miller? (developmental relationship between language and theory of mind – this is the name of Miller's article, but Tomasello has shown that words are not at all necessary).

Boyd analyzes a few cases of ToM being used in religion.

His source about Judaism seems to be one Mr. Drubach, a neuro-scientist Jew who wrote in 2008 about ToM and religion in this same journal; Mr. Drubach does not seem to differentiate between his own knowledge customs and 'Judaism' in general. The sources about other religions are: personal knowledge as a Christian (about Christianity), which shouts un-professionalism, by understanding biblical stories (both OT and NT) in light of later church theology, and for Buddhism – probably Joseph Campbel (translated and interpreted secondary writings about Buddhism).

Here quote of a the analysis of Judaism “a prominent theme in Jewish mystical literature is that of God's empathy of human's emotiona status, be it joy or suffering.” - (p. 373). I cannot allow myself to be speechless here, so I will spell it out: God's empathy is perhaps found in Judaism, but it is hardly the characteristic of it; it is probably more a relatively late Christian notion which is retroactively applied to almost any religion.

And another example: it is probably true that the fact that Jacob thought (mistakenly) that Esau was planning to attack him (in the story in Genesis) is a result of Jacob having ToM (not the mistake, just the fact that Jacob thought that Esau had intentions), but this is hardly the key explanation of the event of the meeting of the two rival brothers. (also page 373).

Another 'pearl' from Boyd's article: "God's mind is capable of accomplishing something good through evil of human minds, became pivotal in Jewish, Christian and Islamic understanding of how God brings good out of evil” (p. 374). I never realized that this was so pivotal.

And the last - “Jesus was a master of using ToM, as evident in his parables”. Trust me, there was no worthwhile proof in any of the parables analyzed.

There are many more such semi-professional statements, which I will spare you.

So – why is ToM the holy grail? I really cannot answer this, because it is not. ToM is too much of a general human quality to be able to account for what Boyd thinks is Judaism Christianity or Islam, or religion in general if such can be defined or found.

Perhaps mr. Boyd has done other very good things, and has written other good books or articles, this one does not meet the requirements of a scholarly article, and makes me doubt the seriousness of the journal.

I will give it to mr. Boyd: I share with him the conviction that ToM is extremely important as a stage in the development of culture, and theistic religions as part of culture. This has to do with a (for the time being fragmented) continuum which takes us from brain to narrative, starting with face-recognition, then ToM, to gossip as a basic human activity (see Dunbar), to narrative condition (or mythic cognition, as Merlin Donald calls it).
This continuum is still fragmented because no research has been done to connect the points on it; I am not even sure that such research can be done, and perhaps 'fragmented' is not such a bad state to be in. But what this continuum assumes - and I think it is my innovation so please quote - is that narrative always entails personification, narrative is about persons (be it a human, animal, a G/god or a personified chair), it always entails an agent to which or to whom a plot is happening. This is the only way to wake emotions in humans, and emotions are the way to provoke meaning.

So, to finish up - ToM is important; the article reviewed misses the opportunity to suggest a serious discussion about this fact.

Religions of the Exogram

While believing in an intended creation, realizing the advantage of rituals, and relating to the personal semiosphere (i.e. soul) should be scientifically possibility attitudes to hold, religion is a totally different thing. Religion is a social construction, each religion in its own culture. The regular cultural activity holds for religions as well: it is a realization that things happen in a certain way, conceptualizing it in the brain, putting it into words, and then even putting it in writing or making a ‘law’ out of it, i.e. asserting that ‘this is how things should be done’.
For example, when people realize how advantaging is realizing that a new moon has come up in the sky, because it is emotionally enjoyable to realize that there will be more and more light at night now, because it is good to pay attention to this for the segmenting time, or for any other reason, they make a law of it that the new moon should be celebrated whenever it comes up, everyone should join the celebration, that means everyone, even those who are not up to it at the moment, or those who are busy doing something else really important. As long as there are enough people in the culture that know and support this tradition, it stays, and it is forced on as many individuals as possible, and it is kept. Once conditions change significantly - because of a war, reorganization because a new elite enforces its narrative, or various other reasons - a tradition might fade away, be forgotten, be replaced by a newer version, or forced out. Merlin Donald, in his book ‘Origins of the Modern Mind’, calls this cultural product Exogram.
This is true for an oral culture. It is more difficult for cultures that put their ideas in writing, and still more difficult in those cultures who invented the idea of not only putting their culture into writing, but also claiming godly authority to the writing, in the form of law, or even more - by claiming eternal godly origin to what is written.
This is true for an oral culture. It is more difficult for cultures that put their ideas in writing, and still more difficult in those cultures who invented the idea of not only putting their culture into writing, but also claiming godly authority to the writing, in the form of law, or even more - by claiming eternal godly origin to what is written.
To be able to claim that a certain document has a godly descent takes a complex social system in which there are elements that are responsible to mediating between the god and the people, and a strong social centralized ruling element that can transfer it into costly writing, and enforce, to some extent, following the written story. But one other result of the claim of a godly origin of a text (i.e. creating a ‘holy text’ in the culture) is that it is impossible to alter. This is true in cultures where god is a supreme omniscient eternal being, whose will and laws never change.
Our modern world religions all ‘suffer’ from this phenomenon - being stuck with a text that is holy and unchangeable, and on the other hand is very old and in many cases irrelevant, not to say explicitly wrong.

What is it telling me?

The animistic experience is that nature is alive. one manifestation of this liveliness is the ability of things in nature - animals, plants, stones, etc. - to ‘speak’ to us.
This seems to be the basis for human culture and religion (together with the idea of the ‘holy’, i.e. of the ‘special’).
A nice description of this feeling, of ‘nature is speaking to us’, is described in Wade Davis' talk in TED.
This notion is embedded in the Shamanic journey experience, when then notion of the natural elements talking to us is reconstructed in a mental journey.

All of this sounds very ‘primitive’, or very ‘newagic’, depends on your point of view.

But if we think of the following:
Looking at a tree and saying - what is he telling me? he is telling me that winter is nearing, when the reference is to a tree in the autumn it then makes completely scientific sense. There is nothing animistic about this, nothing ‘primitive’, or ‘animistic’ about it.

My conclusion: the tendency of ‘hearing’ the environment talking to us/me is a natural inclination of the brain.

So we should differentiate:
Animism: a natural tendency of acquiring information from the surrounding.
Shamanism: doing the previous mentally (common among humans, and much less among other apes, perhaps also among pre-homos, or pre-homo sapience).
Science: doing ‘animism’ with the gray matter of the left side of the brain. Typical of homo sapience sapience (not in earlier homos, or homo sapience, like Neanderthals).
http://www.singsurf.org/brain/rightbrain.php