"It's really a brilliant strategy"

[firecat]

The professor of my Virology MOOC, Vincent Racaniello, spent the first couple of lectures drilling us on how viruses are completely inanimate, are not even alive (depending on how you define "alive"), and definitely can't think or strategize. This week's lectures have been about how viruses get inside cells and how they avoid attaching to the wrong things or being eaten by stuff inside the cell before they are where they need to be. Each time he describes one of the methods he says "It's really a brilliant strategy." (And he's right. I don't believe in a creator deity, so I think it's a strategy not developed on purpose by any consciousness, but it's a strategy, and it's brilliant.)

The professor of my MOOC "A Brief History of Humankind" theorized that Stone Age humans mostly practiced animism, a spiritual system in which everything in the environment is considered to be alive and to have personality, goals, to be able to communicate, etc.

It certainly does seem that animistic metaphors and ways of thinking are built into the language I speak.

Comments

[kaberett]

And of course we say that gravity wants things, or electricity wants things, and I very much talk about my volcanoes as living intemperate unpredictable things.

[lilacsigil]

Honestly, animism is the only religious practice that has ever made any sense to me.

[sasha_feather]

Some scientists think viruses are alive, but I see your point. Sometimes when I talk about what I do, I tell people that biologists (collective noun) can't even agree on what is or is not alive, which is a fun topic of conversation.

[firecat]

The prof has a poll on his web page about that.
http://www.virology.ws/are-viruses-alive/

[pulchritude]

What sasha_feather said. I have a BSc in Microbiology, and yeah, there was definitely a lack of consensus on whether viruses are alive in or not. idk, the professor for a virology course stressing so strongly that viruses aren't alive makes me :\

[firecat]

It's my fault in how I described what he said. The prof did make it clear that scientists don't agree on whether viruses are alive. He personally thinks they aren't but made it clear that it's all down to how you define "alive."

[flarenut]

Animism is -- I think -- evolutionarily favored. Most things in the world either do want stuff (middle and higher animals) and have personalities and motivations, or else they can be mostly-adequately modeled as having personalities and motivations, thus reusing all the parts of our brains and understandings that have become really good at predicting the behavior of creatures with personalities and motivations, namely us. Sometimes that doesn't work and you have to fall back on explicit first or second-principles reasoning, but having the shortcut is probably helpful more often than not.

Interestingly enough, if you spend enough time in other schools of thought, you can develop the same kinds of pseudo-animist understandings, but based on other foundations. For example, I can't look at a tree without thinking about it as a dynamical system where all the branches and their leaves are competing for sunlight and constrained by nutrient flow. (Heh, he said "competing")

[firecat]

Prof also claimed that what distinguishes humans from other animals is that we have language that lets us make up stuff. I wonder if animism is some kind of bridge between concrete and fictive language.

[flarenut]

Might be! I wonder, though, because other social animals seem to do sorta similar things, fitting people and technological objects into their pre-existing schemas (or at least we project that onto them). So maybe the trick is conscious animism, where you recognize that what you're doing isn't literal, can't be literal. And then once that light has gone on the whole world of imagination opens up.

[e4q.livejournal.com]

Also, children are natural animists. If that can be a word.