anthro-promiscuous

Here's one of the things that I consider among my top idiosyncracies: I tend to personify inanimate objects a lot.

It's usually pretty innocuous, and I doubt most people realize how much I do it, but it happens with everything. If I need some unnamed object near another person, I usually ask for it by saying, "Hey, hand me that guy" or "Pass me one of the little blue dudes". It's not a guy; they're not dudes. They're lumps of lifeless material.

It happens even more frequently when I'm working; I've developed this intensely anthropomorphic ontology for my system, complete with a God-like registry object, "angels" and "devils" controlling the various models objects, etc. It's built right in; the objects don't call other functions, they "ask" for the standard controller and "tell" each other about the various events that happen in regards to the user. But there's really no asking or telling, there's only functional execution. The intelligence inherent in the system is mine, not that of the "agents" I have constructed. They only exist for metaphorical purposes.

And yet, as odd as that sometimes seems to me, it appears to be commonplace throughout human thought. Personification of nature or emotion happens frequently in literature or poetry, pagan or tribal religions use the anger or sadness of the spirits inhabiting all things as a rhetorical tool all the time. In philosophy, Aristotle's physics focused on the tendencies of each kind of element to "seek" its sphere (fire goes up, earth down, etc.). Even in more modern, "scientific" disciplines like software, we still put that to use all the time; functions are easily understood as being the actions that the objects undertake upon each other. It simplifies the description because we can understand it; people know what it's like to be people, so if non-human concepts can be described by personification, so much the better.

I guess it's not so strange that I apply my understanding of humanity to these sorts of things. It just strikes me as odd that people tend to glaze over such an incongrous heuristic.