Suzanne asked:

I want to know why humans anthropomorphize rocks, like Mount Rushmore, Easter Island, ancient
Egypt, ancient Mexico etc. Why do we see reflections of ourselves in clouds, cliff faces, tree stumps
etc.?

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I'm going to give you one very one-sided, non-philosophical explanation for this. Recently, some
neurologists have discovered that there are neurons, in the brains of monkeys and probably of man,
which they term "mirror neurons" (see for example Rizzolatti, G., L. Fadiga, et al. (1996). "Premotor
cortex and the recognition of motor actions." Cognitive Brain Research3131-141.). Exactly the same
neurons (in this particular location) fire bothwhen monkeys see othermonkeys make particular
gestures (like grasping at food) andwhen the originalmonkeys make the samegestures. So there
seems to be a kind of recognition of similarity between ourselves and others which is built into the
nervous system. The speculation is that this is the basis for some aspects, at least, of empathy. If we
extrapolate from this, then, anthropomorphizing is a consequence of abstracting from this function.
We see resemblances in action and appearance because, presumably, we are hard-wired to do so
(and it's certainly easy to adduce evolutionary functions of this)... but this can function well or poorly,
in suitable and unsuitable circumstances, like all of our capacities. Thus, clouds and toys as people,
robots as having feelings, etc.

It is, after all, surprising that very young children, in play, impute feelings to their toys, even very
crude toys, is it not? And not only to anthropomorphic toys. There are of course animals and
machines (e.g., "the little engine that could") similarly given human characteristics, if they actat all
human. It seems to me that all these are more or less the same kind of mental acts as seeing faces in
rocks. We haven't taught children to do this; it could be argued that they learn, willy-nilly, from seeing
their parents, etc., to generalize to crude toys... but then why do non-human toys, especially the
machines, elicit the same attributions of feelings in children? The mirror neuron findings, above,
provide, I believe, at least part of the answer to this.

Steven Ravett Brown

I don't know that this is a philosophical question so much as a psychological or neuro-physiological
one. I think the answer is that we are hard-wired to see patterns in things, particularly patterns of
faces. See any good book on child development for more detail.

Tim Sprod