I call this the "Daemon-Haunted World" in reference to Carl Sagan's book
"Demon-Haunted World", where he talks about the triumph of reason over
the "spooks" and demons of superstition. It seems highly ironic to me
that we have not yet finished banishing our old demons before conjuring
up new ones to confuse and confound ourselves.

Wherever you have a departure of mental model from reality that
misunderstanding can give rise to irrational behavior. In the simplest case
we have the old lady who, on being told that electricity is like water, went
around putting tape over her unused outlets so that the electricity
wouldn't leak out... Pretty harmless.

I was watching some normal (non-technical) folks trying to modify
something in their office mgmt software a few months ago, and I was
struck by the cargo cult nature of their understanding of the internal
model of the software. They eventually figured out how to do it but it took
ten minutes for something that would have taken ten seconds in an old
paper-based system. The core of the problem was the mismatch between
users' mental models and the actual (software) machine in front of them.

When these inaccurate models take the form of imaginary entities we have
digital ghosts or spooks, and already some have names: Alexa, Siri, Cortana,
these are strange new gods with opaque and intricate priesthoods. Their
cathedrals are datacenters. They have catechisms and rituals. "Did you
try turning it off and on again?"

Multiplication of unnecessary entities is to be avoided, yes? Ockham's razor...

- - - -

Second, without getting into a big long thing about it, forest spirits
are the forest spirits of today. It's not hard to communicate with them
if you have a good attitude and some basic respect. We are literally of
the same family. One life, One Love.

Science is starting to get into the act, backing up and filling out the
requisite hard science to explain what's going on when, e.g. you talk to
your ficus.

"Wood-wide web" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network

Levin's lab, ambient biological intelligence,
"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous
System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

"every good regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that
system." (Conant and Ashby, 1982)
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html

Living systems are evolving self-regulators, they therefore must have self-models,
our own is called "ego", etc. Because these models are "software"
running on the biological wetware there's no a priori reason why we
shouldn't be able to communicate. It's the same software running on the
same hardware with the same communication protocols.

Neuro-somatic circuit of the "8-Circuit" model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-circuit_model_of_conscio...

As I say, people have been communicating with forest spirits and such for
pretty much all of recorded history (and pre-history if you want to
interpret cave paintings that way...) so from my POV science is just
filling in the details of a phenomenon that is already commonplace.

It also means that, at least to some degree, Sagan was wrong about the
old spooks and demons.