It's the weekend, the dog's playing outside, and it's time to get some well deserved internetting done.  First you head over to YouTube to watch Miley Cyrus smoke a bong, then take a quick swing by Facebook to investigate whether that hottie from work posted any pictures of her Saturday night out.  Disappointed, you follow it up with a nice, relaxing look at your Sunday horoscope.  

The prediction says to treat yourself today, so you redirect to Amazon in an effort to find that 1960's vintage Batmobile toy that you've been eyeing.  Success!  There are 4 left in stock.  Your palms begin to sweat in anticipation, making the removal of a credit card from your wallet that much trickier.  Mounting the challenge, you enter in your number, confirm your order, and click 'buy now'.

Just then, disaster.  Your mouse pointer seizes, the screen flashes a dozen different sickly colours, and your desktop is dominated by fantastically helpful error message. 

***STOP: 0X000000F4 (0X00000003, 0X86B73DAQ, 0X86B73F14, 0X8060566E)

Beginning dump of physical memory.  

At that moment, you slam your fist into the keyboard and curse your stupid computer for intentionally messing up your Sunday.  Outside the dog barks savagely at a sudden wind, and the mechanism of belief in the supernatural is exposed.

"Wait, what's that?" you say.  "I don't understand what that story has to do with the supernatural at all, let alone my feelings about conspiracies.  Did I miss a step?"  Gee, I thought I had been pretty clear there.  Let me try again.

You get a call from your brother who tells you he's in the drunk tank again, and in desperate need of bail.  This would be irksome enough on it's own, but it's made slightly more frustrating when you remember that you leant him your car last night.  Turns out the car's been impounded after your brother tried to park it in somebody's rose garden, so you have to take two buses to the impound lot to pick it up before heading down to the county jail.

Just as the impound man looks up the paperwork on your car you realize that it would have been helpful if you had remembered to bring at least one of the following items with you:

1. your wallet
2. your car keys
3. another bus ticket
4. your umbrella

Why?  Well, the skies are boiling, and as you walk the ten blocks back home to fetch your keys and some money, a thunderstorm strikes and soaks you from head to toe.  You think to yourself "The universe sure does have it in for me today", just as a passing cab hits a puddle and blasts you with a spray of mud.

In that moment, it is plainly obvious why we believe in ghosts and vast government conspiracies.  

Still not following?  Alright, maybe I'm not the storyteller I thought I was.  Let's instead get at the science.  

Mankind, and indeed most animals, evolved very powerful mind-based survival tools.  These include things like pattern recognition and problem solving, but also include a lesser known phenomenon known as 'agency detection'.  The long and the short of it is this: in the wild it's important for an animal to be able to figure out which things could potentially eat them, and a good starting point is to determine which things are hungry.  By that I mean, an animal needs to know the difference between a rock and a tree and a hyena.  Two of them are alive, but only one of them has purpose, intentions, and supper times.  Unlike the rock and tree the hyena can make decisions, formulate rudimentary plans, and turn you into dinner.

Agency detection is the ability in animals to recognize in some potential threat the presence of thought.  An 'agent' is what we call an individual with these characteristics.  Whether it's another person, an animal, or a sophisticated robot, an agent is something that can work against you — something that is capable of making decisions; and should therefore be dealt with accordingly.  A giant rolling boulder could certainly be considered a threat, but it doesn't harbour any intention to crush you.  It is therefore absent of agency.  That means that it can be avoided using different methods than if agency was present.  Any animal worried about being crushed by a boulder can safely ease up it's escape effort once clear of the boulder's path.  There's no concern that the rock might suddenly and vindictively change course in an effort to finish the critter off.

And yet it's far more complex a deal than just saying that we detect agency in things that have faces.  The rustling of nearby reeds or bushes could communicate agency, as could the sound of a cracking twig or the cocking of a rifle.  Any potential prey that observes one of these disturbances instantly goes into a state of agency detection, trying to figure out if there's a being with intentions on the other side of those reeds.  If so, much more drastic escape plans are needed.

One of the most successful strategies in evolutionary history has been to push the threshold for assessing agency just a little bit too far.  The philosophy goes something like this: if the reeds are a russlin', might as well get husslin'.  It is of evolutionary benefit to assume agency slightly more often than it's actually there, because that strategy maximizes the avoidance of predators, with very minimal sacrifice.  There's no harm in incorrectly gambling that some disturbance does represent agency, because the worst case scenario is that you're wrong.  If so, all it cost you was a little bit of energy from running away.  Far better to err on the side of caution in the dog-eat-dog world of natural selection.

In fact, that's what the dog in our story is doing every time he barks at the wind.  Most of us have seen dogs do this; one moment they're fine, the next they're losing their temper at the ironing board.  The dog is not convinced that there's an agent present in the wind, but he's not willing to take the risk when there's a household to protect.  He has evolved in such a way to start barking whenever some strange noise gets his attention, because if that noise does end up coming from another animal he has a good chance of frightening it off.

How does this apply to people?  We evolved in much the same way as the dog did, and evolved tendencies don't just go away overnight.  As a result, we impose agency on to all sorts of things that don't warrant it.  Remember those Ikea commercials where the announcer makes fun of you for pitying a discarded sofa?  The common tendency of projecting human qualities onto inanimate objects is a perfect example of our overactive sense of agency.  The gentleman in the first story above treated the computer as if it was intentionally acting with malice against him, and the man in the second story did the same with the weather.  Neither story should seem unfamiliar to you, as people do this sort of thing all the time.  Both are examples of how humans like to take everything personally, or rather to assume that some sort of personhood is the cause of everything that happens.

It's been hypothesized that our fondness for imagining agents is the reason we developed the idea of gods in the first place; that when presented with such a complex world — operating by mechanisms so far outside our level of understanding — an all powerful conductor-agent seemed perfectly logical.  We simply couldn't imagine forces so powerful moving without being the result of someone else's will.  It's almost certainly why people think ludicrous conspiracy theories are more likely reasons for our problems than simple ones.  No cure for cancer?  Well, that must be the evil and all powerful 'them' at work, maliciously deciding to keep us sick and dying.  It couldn't possibly be that curing cancer is just really, really hard.  The latter is by far the more plausible possibility, but the former reminds us of the type of threats we evolved to be cautious of.

It's also probably the reason we look at horoscopes, because that discipline attributes human-like intentions to the very stars that surround and dwarf us.  According to astrology, the heavens exist solely to guide our fortunes, and so give us the comfort of a preferred position in this big, scary cosmos.  

A creak in the night becomes a ghastly spirit that wants you out of the house.  A shooting star becomes a promise of granted wishes.  A stroke of bad luck becomes karma, quite literally the idea that the universe decided to punish you for former transgressions.  Humans prefer to see everything that happens as the result of some sort of choice, even if they can't imagine who it would be that had made it.  They favour the idea that's been bred into our genes; to imagine a decision maker behind every development.  Almost every pseudoscientific or faith-based claim seeks to strengthen this belief, continually arguing against the one concept that frightens us the most: that being the idea that nobody's steering the ship.  

Whether or not gods exist, there's simply no reason to believe that they're currently interacting with the world.  Nor is there any demonstrated validity to ideas like karma, astrology, vast conspiracies, ghosts, or psychic abilities.  Every one has been examined and shown likely to be hogwash, and yet our culture sustains these ideas at great cost, mostly because they satisfy our need to feel like the world can be reasoned with.

Yet we are unique amongst the species of this planet in our ability to reason, and it's through reason that we can discover the true cause to each effect.  With intellectual discipline, by going with more than our gut reactions, by examining and valuing evidence; we're able to envision the world in another way.  It has only been since the ancients Greeks first came across this idea that mankind emerged from it's dark history of mysticism.  They developed the thinking tools that we today call science.  With these tools, we can overcome our fears about rustling reeds and — pardon the alliteration — learn about the real reasons that reeds rustle.

You can't be entirely blamed for imagining that the universe is out to get you, because you evolved in such a way to do just that.  But by remaining unskeptical of what our genes are telling us we're doing no better than a dog barking into the wind, and to be honest, I think our collective throat is getting a little hoarse. 

Read more on the study of agency detection here.

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