@parker @NEETzsche @bot Tendencies towards anthropomorphicisation are interesting. From the perspective of Jungian psychology (far right on this diagram,) the anthropomorphicisation *becomes* the thing: note the distinction from the scientist position (represented by the atom symbol column directly left of it.) The phenomena, Jung argues, is not entirely internal: the person isn't just "imagining" the tree's speech, their unconscious is projecting it, and their conscious is experiencing it.

This is a notion I subscribe to personally, but I don't think even that tells the whole picture. Taken in the context of the universe as an individual experience (qualia, or in a more fleshed-out spiritual sense, "Ishvara," a Hindu term referring to the only cognition of Brahman ("God") that can be arrived at by the Atman ("Self",) clouded as it is by Maya (the Atman's experience and imagination, what it knows and what it can conceive of)) it takes on some fairly alarming connotations.

Thus in my cognition, the anthropomorphicisation we project onto the dots affects what the dots are.