💾 Archived View for gmi.bacardi55.io › gemlog › 2022 › 09 › 06 › software-antropomorphism-weird-brai… captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:13:13. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Posted on 2022-09-06
I have starting on my blog a quick series of post about orgmode and emacs[1]. I installed emacs about 6 months ago just because I wanted to try orgmode. The goal of this gemlog post is not to repeat what I've published on my blog, that wouldn't be interesting… But more a reflection I had right after finishing proof reading my blog post and after starting the deploy script… I had a weird feeling about publishing a post about emacs… Me, a strong advocate for vim for so many years! Don't get me wrong, I'm still a vim user but orgmode made emacs appealing. Without orgmode, I would have ditched emacs after a few month of trying.
But during deployment I had this flashing thought of me "betraying" vim… How weird of a thought is this? How could I "betray" a software… I know our brain has the tendency towards anthropomorphism and while I disregarded that thought quickly, I still found it amusing. I'm sure many others have had thoughts like this for not living things! Even David Hume[2] wrote hundreds of years ago:
there is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves.
And this has been confirmed with many studies that you can find online. We, human, have the tendency to anthropomorphize things to understand them better. I won't talk about the psychology behind it because you can find way better information online that I could write from the top of my head, but I find it fascinating to see the intuitive response first and then the reaction of the more "analytic" part of our brain :].
Are you amazed by how the human brain works too? It is a truly fascinating subject, that we are far from completely understanding yet! I hope to continue learning a lot more about it!
Footnotes
_________
[1] [My blog post about orgmode and emacs (HTTPS)]
[2] [David Hume wikipedia page (HTTPS)]