I commented in agreement with Matt McCormick’s post on The God Projector:
There is a very good book by Reeves and Nass called “The Media Equation” looking at the psychological responses of human beings to various media, including television and computers in particular. One of the telling elements which jibes quite well with the ideas presented here is solid evidence that our psychological reactions to computers automatically ascribe human emotional contexts to machines. One of a number of well-documented examples is the subconscious positive bias we make when filling out a survey about the qualities of a computer program. If we fill it out on the same physical computer on which we used the program, then we give higher scores than if we fill it out on a different (but otherwise identical) machine. So, given a lab with two identical Dell computers in them if we fill out the questionnaire on the one we used a program on then we give higher results for the program than sitting at an identical machine. The only mechanism that seems plausible for this conclusion is that we’re hardwired to avoid hurting the feelings of the computer we used. These results are consistent even among people with a high level of education about computers and a high level of intelligence. So, there are hard-wired subconscious elements of the human brain that attempt to ascribe human-like qualities to everything we interact with. Hence “don’t make the lightning mad” is perfectly reasonable as a first hard-wired reaction. However, what makes humans different from most animals is our abilities to communicate abstract ideas in multiple forms, including writing. In addition to our conscious and subconscious minds we have generated new meta-rules such as science which allow us to bypass our hardwired perceptions and reactions to some extent. So, although it may be impossible for us to directly perceive the concave face sculpture in reality rather than in the illusion of convexity, we are capable of taking multiple viewings of it, including oblique ones where the visual illusion does not interfere with the accuracy of our perceptions. We then believe that the sculpture is concave even when the evidence of our senses from certain viewpoints is that it is convex. The difference between a religious and a non-religious person is, to my mind, that when confronted with the concave/convex perceptual discontinuity, a religious person declaims “a miracle” that transcends our understanding of reality. A scientific person looks at the evidence of sight (sometimes concave, sometimes convex) the evidence of touch (always concave); the evidence of multiple sight (always concave from some viewpoints, always convex from others, consistently so) and comes to the conclusion that the convexity is an illusion, and then continues to explore why the illusion occurs. A non-religious person explores the unvierse with all their senses and tries to create a consistent theory which is true for all people at all times, and then adjusts that theory when it is shown to be partly invalid (see Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations). A religious person declaims a miracle and says that something is beyond understanding, and is hurt when others proffer a non-miraculous explanation. I’ve posted before about Roger Zelazny’s excellent description of this tendency whereby “bowing before the unknown” and “calling it unknowable” makes one lose sight of the solid foundations of the universe. As has been said many times by others, antibiotics, radios, airplanes and many other technological achievements of modern life would be miraculous to someone from the middle ages, but are not miracles, just the application of solid exploration of the physical universe.