Hew-mons have a long standing tendency to see agency where it does not belong, from hearth gods, to lightning bolts thrown by Zeus, to suspecting a saber tooth behind every rustling tree. That is a priori reason not to assume agency prematurely.
There are conditions (arbitrarily chosen example: prodromal schizophreny …) that amplify that bias; from hearing voices to seeing hidden messages. While a big (infinite) universe may contain all sorts of curious phenomena, from cosmic planetaria to Hubble volumes in which a deity reigns, the question becomes not “who can list the most agenty hypotheses”, but instead “why privilege agenty hypotheses, why be invested in them in the first place”, a reason for which has historically been the human psyche.
Hew-mons have a long standing tendency to see agency where it does not belong, from hearth gods, to lightning bolts thrown by Zeus, to suspecting a saber tooth behind every rustling tree. That is a priori reason not to assume agency prematurely.
There are conditions (arbitrarily chosen example: prodromal schizophreny …) that amplify that bias; from hearing voices to seeing hidden messages. While a big (infinite) universe may contain all sorts of curious phenomena, from cosmic planetaria to Hubble volumes in which a deity reigns, the question becomes not “who can list the most agenty hypotheses”, but instead “why privilege agenty hypotheses, why be invested in them in the first place”, a reason for which has historically been the human psyche.