Why We Hallucinate Supernatural Explanations
We’re not so different from an error-prone chatbot. The post Why We Hallucinate Supernatural Explanations appeared first on Nautilus.
God spent his third day of creation emitting rain from his chest, bringing forth plants from dry land. Or at least that’s how the artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld depicted God in his 18th-century engraving The Third Day of Creation. In Schnorr’s image the divine source of rain clearly looks like a human.
Today we’d call this anthropomorphism—the tendency to attribute human characteristics to non-human targets. It’s in childhood and across the: They see the ocean as conscious, they think the wind has intentions, they say mountains have free will. They look at nature and see an aspect of themselves reflected back.
