Amerika

When humans refer to projection, we refer to the human tendency to take an initial perception of a situation and fit facts into that model. Only cause-effect logic allows us to accurately perceive what is based on how it came to be, and this avoids us trapping ourselves in categorical logic used to rationalize details into a narrative.

It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. An animal is without even the semblance of free will. Predestined by its instincts, it has no choice. In every circumstance it must do the thing that the age-long experience of its species has found to be, on the whole, most profitable for specific survival. Judged by utilitarian standards, what it does is, generally, the right thing. (This applies, of course, only to the animal’s behaviour in, statistically speaking, “normal” circumstances. In circumstances that are to any considerable extent unlike average circumstances, the animal almost always does the hopelessly wrong thing.)

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite Intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as a punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example, would kill one of its foals in order to make the wind change its direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent, but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
— Aldous Huxley, “Amor Fati,” Texts and Pretexts (1935)

Projected intelligence fits within the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which says that people cannot understand things which require more intelligence than they have, or the natural solipsism of large-brained creatures who get more stimulus from their brains than the external world.

Much of what humans think can be ascribed solely to superstition, which is simply another form of rationalization from categorical logic, itself a variety of mentally-calming symbolism.

Few understand this now, or the need to find structures in parallel between instances — such as thought, matter, and energy, or even future and past, perhaps heavens and Earth — in order to avoid projection and attribute the correct cause to each effect, but as the Age of Symbolism recedes, more are open to these questions.

Tags: aldous huxley, dunning-kruger effect, intelligence, perception, solipsism, superstition