While working on the Göbekli Tepe Series, a reader suggested some possible intersections with the work of Julian Jaynes. At her suggestion I’m reading The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) and some of Jaynes’ other writings, including his 1970 essay on “The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth [...]
Tags:agency attribution·agency detection·animation·animism·Edward Tylor·Fabricus ab Aquapendente·folk physics·HADD·Julian Jaynes·motion·movement
Humans everywhere are inveterate storytellers. Because storytelling, in the form of narrative, is found in all cultures and is structurally similar — with agents and action linked together by causation — there is excellent reason to think this ability is the result of intense selection pressure and is not simply a byproduct of other cognitive [...]
Tags:adaptation·agency detection·ancestral environment·archetypes·byproduct·causal attribution·causation·cause·correlation·David Hume·effect·folklore·Immanuel Kant·information·language·Michelle Scalise Sugiyama·narration·narrative·social information·stories·storytelling·tales·theory of mind
Andrew Brown from The Guardian recently attended a talk by Tanya Luhrman, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford who is studying the charismatic Christian Vineyard churches in California. Having attended similar churches in my youth, I was particularly interested in the kinds of things an ethnographer might have observed. Brown’s report provides some context:
The Vineyard churches [...]
Tags:agency detection·anthropomorphism·charismatics·evangelicals·Stewart Guthrie·Tanya Luhrman
