Attribution of Inner Impulses to External Agents
According to the paper’s framework, people may attribute inner impulses to external agents or divine voices because consciousness experiences itself as a unified, intentional self, while much of the mind’s processing ...
According to the paper’s framework, people may attribute inner impulses to external agents or divine voices because consciousness experiences itself as a unified, intentional self, while much of the mind’s processing occurs outside conscious awareness .[:cite[1]{ln=3}]–[:cite[1]{ln=5}] The subconscious continuously integrates sensory input, emotions, learned patterns, memories, and past experiences; it detects patterns, calculates probabilities, and generates impulses.[:cite[2]{ln=2}]–[:cite[2]{ln=6}] Because these processes are opaque to consciousness, their effects can feel as though they came “from elsewhere.”[:cite[3]{ln=1}]–[:cite[3]{ln=3}] The paper calls the resulting error “conscious narcissism” : the conscious self is mistakenly treated as the whole self, so anything not consciously initiated is classified as “not me”—an outside visitor or agent.[:cite[4]{ln=1}]–[:cite[4]{ln=4}] A second factor is hyperactive agency detection . A mechanism that helped humans detect predators and intentions can also encourage people to perceive agency in ambiguous events, hear intention in random occurrences, or interpret their own subconscious promptings as messages from an external intelligence.[:cite[3]{ln=4}]–[:cite[3]{ln=5}] Religious interpretation can then reinforce the attribution. Once subconscious content is received as divine command, personal fears, biases, traumas, and assumptions may acquire the authority of a supposedly infallible external source.[:cite[5]{ln=1}]–[:cite[5]{ln=5}] The paper therefore distinguishes between treating religious language as poetry—metaphor and meaning making—and treating it as literal explanatory authority.[:cite[6]{ln=1}]–[:cite[6]{ln=3}] ==In short: impulses can feel divine or externally imposed when their subconscious origins are hidden from awareness, while the conscious self mistakenly excludes those origins from its definition of “me.”==[:cite[3]{ln=2}]–[:cite[3]{ln=5}][:cite[4]{ln=2}]–[:cite[4]{ln=4}]