Do we imbue objects and perhaps people and events with more meaning than we should? Or is there more meaning than we rationally perceive? Professor Hood developed a number of experiments which he believes demonstrates that even the most rational of us gives greater credibility to ‘superstition’ and intuition than we realise.
I am not too convinced of his cardigan experiment. ‘Disgust’ has long been known to play a deeply functional role in humans. Disgust of a person covered in suppurating sores is thought to be functional insofar as people naturally avoid situations which might expose them to infectious diseases. Similarly bovines avoid the rich sweet grass which grows up from around their fertilizing faeces. Thereby they avoid one opportunity to be infected by parasites.
Disgust, is deeply innate within us. It is thought to have generalised in humans to become socially functional. By being disgusted by those who do things which are socially dysfunctional we both exclude them and reinforce socially acceptable (and functional) bounds. Whether or not the cardigan experiment is confusing the disgust response with some idea that people imbue objects with added meaning is uncertain from this report, but it does raise an important question. Are we humans naturally disposed to imbue things with meanings which they do not possess? Is that cardigan somehow symbolically powerful as an emblem of an unacceptable behaviour? Does wearing it ‘signify’, at some primitive social level, support for the previous owners actions? Or even worse does it carry some psychic taint? I don’t know.
This is one of the difficulties we face. Is our tendency to see meaning and patterns in things some faulty carry over from primitive functionality? Or is it a natural deeper perception of the way energies circulate and persist between people and people and objects? The former position is safe and comfortable. We can all read a psychologists report about some hang over functionality with a slight blush and the comfortable knowledge that our minds have penetrated this self deception and so we still feel in control.
Professor Hood invites us to consider whether we might have outmoded wiring or whether there is something more… Whether it is actually real. People who use divination are already sitting fairly comfortably on one side of this question. To a large degree we have decided our position.
It seems to me that we could divide the human race as being on one side or other of this question. My experience of synchronicity and the effectiveness of the Yijing make me more than a little biased. But when I look at history and at some of the rational decisions we have made in this world, with their obvious deep flaws, I can’t help wondering whether we should give the benefit of the doubt to an extended world complexity view… one where meaning not outcome counts and where the way we perceive and do things is more important than the goal we think is desirable.