Agenticity

Like most young boys (and some nerdy girls), I spent a lot of time wondering about the great mysteries of our time: aliens, sasquatch, and the bermuda triangle. I read as many books from the library as I could get my grubby little hands on, watched episodes of Unsolved Mysteries once the opening scenes were finished (too scary), and rented as many VHS tapes as I could from S&S Videoworks down the street.

As I reflect back on it, I seem to remember a lot more mainstream media coverage on those topics, as well as specials on the end of the world, biblical prophesy, and the dead sea scrolls (the last three being interrelated as far as the one-hour specials on Fox were concerned). Perhaps it was a symptom of postmodernism: the fall of the great political super powers to capitolism, the shallow light of day after the plastic, neon night of materialism that was the 1980s, and so on. We were a culture looking for answers and/or some kind of salvation, whether it was through the end times or the arrival of the ineffable powers that be.


I grew up, though, and the idea of sasquatch and aliens, however pleasurable to my simple, suburban world, seemed implausible to the rational, adult world I was becoming a part of. Every once in a while, I picked up a book or an article on the great mysteries of my childhood, and although some authors make a good argument for the supernatural (Daniel Pinchbeck's research on aliens and crop circles in 2012 are intriguing), I found myself erring on the Dana Scully side of the X-Files. I want to believe, but I just can't.


Scientific American recently published a short essay by Michael Shermer that coincides with my venture into Scully-levels of skepticism. The theory is based on another theory by the author:

“Patternicity:” the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.

In it, he explains that, as a result of this tendency, we project larger meanings onto these patterns.

“Agent­icity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness).

In other words, if these patterns do exist (empirically or not, it doesn't seem to matter), humans will find a pattern in the chaos of the universe. If there is a pattern, it has to have been created by some intelligent being(s), and if we are only now perceiving it, it must have been there prior to our existence or ability to perceive it in terms of technology. Considering this, the being(s) must be beyond us in intellect and power, thus he/she/it/they must be controlling us.

I don't know if I buy it, necessarily, but it does seem to account for a lot of those terrible one-hour specials about Nostradamus and the dead sea scrolls, not to mention The DaVinci Code. In the end, it's another theory that seems to outweigh the irrational accounts and theories of the believers of the world.

Like I said...


But I just can't.