Vunerabilities.
1) Cause and Effectitus:
We are very suceptable to 'miracle syndrome' because of an ability unique to humans (and to a lesser degree, the higher animals) the ability to link events occurring within close spacial and/or temporal proximity to each other into webs of cause and effect. We see a flash, then hear a bang, and automatically link them into a sequence - if this, then that - tenuously at first, but more and more firmly with each repetition. Trouble is, because this system is largely subconscious (dopamine neurones) and therefore not reflexively 'rational' it is very prone to being conned. The system also has another glitch, it operates on a sliding scale - in which the number of observed repetitions can be substituted by size of payoff, especially if that payoff is unexpected.
ie: if percieved event X occurs followed closely by event Y, but doesn't actually have any particular direct effect (good or bad) on the perciever, then let's say it will take arbitrarily 50 such observences of the sequence for it to become 'learned'. This kind of situation describes 'background' events and leads to stuff like 'red sky at night, shepherd's delight.' Something useful pretty much only to the herders of sheep.
However, if event A occurs, followed closely by event B, but this time acompanied by direct payoff/detriment C, the learning curve, depending on the size of the effect involved, is cut down to fewer and fewer repetitions. Imagine something stupid, like a clown with a pair of cymbals. He clashes them together, and, undetected by you, his assistant zaps you with 1000 volts, right in the butt. How many times do you think it would take you to form an unconscious aversion to clowns armed with cymbals..?Imagine some kid on his deathbed. He's a few breaths away from being a corpse. As an absolute last resort, his desperate parents bring in some weird guy plastered in mystic symbols and chanting magic runes. On cue, after the final shazzam, their kid suddenly wakes up, blinks and looks up at them. Miraculously his fever has broken, and the shadow of death has left his eyes. They weep with relief. Weird tattoo-chanting guy falls to his knees and begins to praise god.
How many repetitions would that linkage take to form..? Fifty..?
Ten..?
Five..?
One..?
The important thing to remember is that there is no connection between weird chanty guy and recovered kid. Oh yes there is, you say. Oh no there isn't, I say. Oh yes there is, you say. STFU I say. I know - Because, I've been watching weird chanty guy for some time now. In the last month he's been called round to twenty different houses, containing twenty different dying kids. In each he's done the same silly dance, sung the same damn song, and waved the same little tamborine-thingy full of dried beans. And in each house, every one of those poor kids hacked out their final little breaths and died.
Lots of kids get ill. Lot's more in the past - that scary past where hygene was poor and antibiotics non-existant. And lots of kids died. But some of them lived, er, obviously. And this is the point. Kids do get better. Every year a tiny fraction of kids (and grown-ups too for that matter) even though they are all but kicking down death's door, suddenly get better. All by themselves. Spontaneous remission. Look it up.
But sometimes the event 'get better' co-incides with the event 'Weird magic chanty guy.' And then, the wires get crossed.
I don't know about you, but right now, even though I'm writing this, and try to live fairly squarely in my forebrain, rather than the bit behind it, I can feel my hind-brain niggling. After all the books I've read, and the huge amounts of history that is chiefly connected by the deaths of millions of people who were not saved by supernatural means, a part of me is still saying quietly to itself "but-but-but that weird-chanty guy must have had something to do with it."
Which leads me onto vunerability 2.
2) Addiction to explanation:
If our minds were simply content with drawing connections between events x and events y, then perhaps we wouldn't have so much trouble. Trouble is though, the fact that 99 times out of 100 there is a connection of some sort between event x and event y is in itself an adaptive force that over the epoches has rooted itself so deeply into our genetic predispositions that we no longer need to actually witness event x to intuit its presence simply by witnessing event y.
Have you ever been just about to drift off into sleep when suddenly you hear a noise somewhere in the house..? It wasn't a 'fridge coming on' kinda noise, neither was it a 'ticking pipe' kinda noise, nor a 'rattling tree-branch' kinda noise either. One of those noises. I hate those noises. They make you lie awake for a while, straining with every sense for its repetition, half hoping to hear it again, half not. And all the while your mind is going crazy, trying out a thousand theories, trying to fit that noise into any one of the thousand holes of noises past stored in your memory, and at the same time hormones are leaking through your muscles, pricking up the hairs on your arms and the back of your neck and making you remember you have that length of steel piping hidden under the bed, just in case...
You have to get up. You have to get up and search for the cause. Any cause will do, however half-arsed it may be, just so long as you can get back to sleep without worrying overmuch that you'll never wake up again.
We're addicted to explanations.
One of the irritating things about finding bodies in the morning is that you are left with event y - ie the body - but event x is nowhere in sight. This leaves your hind-brain backtracking through the 'shit that happened yesterday' list until it gets to the last event that ocurred prior to 'finding dead body', which is unfortunately 'it got dark'. There's a huge gap. (But just to be on the safe side, your brain chemistry begins to make you afraid of the dark anyway, however illogical it may be).
You're left with intuited theories like - "When it gets dark, poeple die." or worse, "darkness kills people". Maybe primitive scientist, in light of this budding fear, tests his theory. He gets volunteer 1 to enter darkened hut A to see if the darkness kills him. It doesn't. You'd think this would be a relief, but it isn't. If darkness killed, you could just make sure you always kept the fire burning, a bit of a pain, but no biggie.
So then you're left with "Something in the darkness kills people." Now that's harder to test. Because to test it, you have to go into the darkness. But say primitive scientist has a few brave mates and they all venture off into the dark the next night, albeit with a bunch of flaming torches.
They don't die. Still no relief.
The next night they go out again, but without the torches.
They don't die. Damn.
But hang on, that body was just one body, not a bunch of people. Now the theory becomes "something in the darkness kills people who are own their own..." So, primitive scientist, who, in addition to being brave is also a fucking idiot, goes out the next night into the darkness, all by himself.
They find him in the morning. dead as a doornail.
When I was younger, soon after I'd gotten my first job, I suddenly had more money than I knew what to do with, and the freedom to spend it on any old shit I fancied. One of the first things I bought was a good take-down bow, and a bunch of sexy black carbon fibre arrows. I lived in an empty farm house at the time - a renovated old serf's cottage. There was a large field out back, laying fallow. I lugged a couple of hay bales (note - surprisingly heavy for a bunch of dried grass) and set them up, pinning a target to a couple of layers of cardboard and sticking it up to shoot at.
I lost the first arrow I ever shot. Not because I missed, but because the arrow struck the target squarely in the blue ring, and went right through, presumably to bury itself completely in the soil somewhere beyond. I never found it. The arrows btw. were blunt tipped - rounded, and the bow itself was only a 40lb draw target bow, not the heavier 70lb hunting type, and yet, the arrow, from 30m away went through the paper, 3 layers of cardboard, about 2 feet of densely packed straw, and still had enough energy left to bury it's 60cm length in the loose soil.
Imagine you're hungry and tired, hunting at dusk. You hear a noise, and loose an arrow. You hit something. Unfortunately you find some poor bastard leaking from the neck, and no arrow in sight. After fruitlessly scouting around a bit, you decide to scarper back off to your village, and keep stumm. The ground is loamy, and there's a local shower of rain, though it's dried up by the morning, in fact, you'd never have known it had rained at all.
In the morning a body is found, white as a sheet, with two clean holes in its throat, and no blood to be seen anywhere. Scary.
Or imagine that same night. Some guy's drunk as a skunk, weaving his way through the darkness back home. Unfortunately, he runs into the end of a pointy branch, right at throat height. Manages to sever a carotid. Bleeds to death on that same bit of loamy ground, and is washed down by that same shower.
The whole village begins to talk about it. Then dotty old granny remembers a story she heard, ooh way back, happened to a friend of a friend's uncle in the old country. About monsters who sucked the blood of people caught alone in the dark. Holy-moley says everyone - so that's what happened to that first guy, and primitive scientist guy. Oh boy we are so fucked now.
But then granny also remembers that garlic drives them off.
Vampires are bullshit. Along with fairies, werewolves and ghosties and ghoulies of all kinds. But, they are useful bullshit. Because they offer cause. And much more importantly, they offer precautions. Garlic. Wolfsbane, silver, secret signs, chants and ritual movements. The unknown killer in the darkness which cannot be stopped by any means becomes the (falsely) known killer in the darkness, which can. Whip out your garlic necklace and you're safe as houses - wanna go for a walk in the nightime..? Go right ahead.
Nothing has changed. Some people will go out into the dark, and never come back. But the important bit to remember is, the people who know about vampires, will still be able to go out in the dark, whereas the ones who have no explanations at all, not even bullshit ones, won't. And sooner or later, something very mundane, maybe called Fred, armed with a bad attitude, an empty belly and very little food, will come out of the unwatched and unventured-into darkness and kill them for the contents of the pantry.
Any explanation is better than none.
3: Loss Aversion:
I know, I know, you're wondering what the hell loss aversion has got to do with something purely conceptual, having no actual material worth. How can you fear the loss of something not there to begin with..?
Aha.
When I was younger. :lol: Again. I used to paint. Okay, I wasn't the world's best painter, but equally, I wasn't the worst guy to ever pick up a brush.
One of the most expensive paintings in the world is this one:
Now, say one day I was bored, so I painted a picture. For some reason I painted it using the exact same type and amounts of paint that Van Gogh used in painting Dr. Gachet, down to the last milligram. By happenstance, I also use the same colours, in exactly the same overall proportions. The same kind of canvas on the same stretchers. The same kind of brush-strokes. When I'm finished, and the damn paint has dried, I install it in the same frame that currently houses Van Gogh's original pic.
It's not bad. Let's say it ends up a bit like this, but better, obviously.Tucking the finished painting under my arm, I trot round to Mr. More-Money-Than-Sense's mansion and show him. He says "What's that fucking piece of crap..?" And I ask him why.
The materials.
The materials are the same.
The quality of paint.
It's the same paint.
The brushwork.
It's the same brushwork.
The subject.
Mine's got a guy with a hat and a flower sitting at a table. And look ! Mine's actually got extra stuff in too !!!
So now, poor Mr. Bigbucks is feeling angry. Materially, he's just bought a painting that only cost me about 50 dollars for 82.5 million. So now he starts going on about composition. It's passion. The depth of feeling it invokes in the viewer. The painting's age, it's history and the reputation of Van Gogh himself; the fact that it's one of the most sought after and well known images in the world. He wins of course. In those terms, my painting is a bunch of crap.
But it's important to notice two things. One: those terms are all conceptual terms, you can neither hold them in your hand, nor put them in your pocket. And two: to justify his investment, he was forced to resort to a conceptual defence, otherwise, what was he left with..? A nice picture worth 50 bucks. A real, tangible loss of $82,499,050.oo cents.
How's that for loss aversion..?
Investments don't need to be made in money of course. What's money anyway but crystallized time and effort..? What hurts more in divorce..? Your bwoken widdle heart, or the now worthless years you invested in your marriage, the blood the sweat the tears..? Broken hearts can easily be fixed by 18-year old Swedish exchange students, or alternatively by prozac™. But those years, that energy, they're lost forever.
And so it is with any conceptual property. Once you have it, it aquires value - sometimes simply the warm glow in your heart when you look upon a woman who loves you, and sometimes a real tangible value - especially if your profession is based upon a concept - then that concept is food in your stomach and clothes on your back.
However, that value, being conceptual, is prone to conceptual attack. And if you're a priest then some weirdy beardy guy proclaiming 'god icht dead' might as well be stealing your wallet.
Pretty self explanatory, but often forgotten. Mankind does like it's drugs. I mean fruits practically ferment themselves... Show a man a mushroom, and soon enough he's tripped out of his skull talkin' to the angels. I wasn't exactly a regular on LSD back in my early twenties, but I did take enough to see some weird and wonderful things.
To cut a long story shorter, our brains are only pimped out TVs, hit 'em hard enough and the picture goes all screwy, sometimes permanently. Hell, you don't even have to hit them that hard.
Socially however, in times when nobody studied chemistry and neurobiology, beyond knocking holes in their skulls to let out evil spirits, there would be no solid conceptual platform from which to judge 'real' experiences from 'illusionary' experiences generated through neurochemical imbalance or malfunction, especially if said episode of intoxication were accidental and unintended.
Such things would then form the seed-crystals for incorporation into (fabulous) explainations, as mentioned above.
In conclusion: It's not surprising that, as a species, we believe in so much weird bullshit, we were inevitably always going to.
