>> A way of Davies is to assume personification of these emergent effects.
>> Actually, IMO, all these effects are as impersonal as gravity. Any
>> personification or "personhood" manifest from "higher dimension" is beyond
>> any human consideration. Any experience is impersonal. We may tell stories
>> otherwise, but those are hubris driven stories. Even we "humans" practice
>> personification stories on ourselves. Davies likes to practice similar
>> stories
>> to make his observations more "exciting", similar to a snake oil salesman.
See :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil
"The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a travelling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling some
medicine (such as snake oil) with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence, typically bogus. To
enhance sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a "shill") would often "attest" the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying
enthusiasm. The "doctor" would prudently leave town before his customers realized that they had been cheated. This practice is also
called "grifting" and its practitioners "grifters".
W. C. Fields portrayed a Western frontier American snake oil salesman in Poppy (1936), complete with a surreptitious crowd
accomplice. His demonstration (from the back of a buckboard transparently fraudulent —- to the movie audience) of a miraculous cure
for hoarseness ignited a comic purchasing frenzy. Jim Dale gave a testament to the persuasive power of the snake oil salesman in the
Disney film Pete's Dragon, as the greedy "Doc" Terminus. Dealing with a crowd of people he had conned on a prior visit, Terminus
turns them from angry vengeance-seekers to believers once more, paying top dollar for Terminus' products despite their previous
ineffectiveness.
English musician and comedy writer Vivian Stanshall satirised a miracle cosmetic as "Rillago—the great ape repellent" and many of J.
B. Morton's Beachcomber books and radio programmes included short spoof advertisements for "Snibbo" a fictional treatment allegedly
tackling various unlikely human conditions.
In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain presents Aunt Polly as a true believer in various sorts of snake oil, though not always
in the form of an alleged medicine. She also adopted cold showers as a cure-all at one point in Tom's childhood. For a time she
insisted that Tom Sawyer take painkillers every day, simply because she thought it would be good for him, until Tom gave some to a
cat, who then acted crazy. After seeing the cat, Aunt Polly no longer forces Tom to take pain killers.
In a more modern appearance of grifting in pop-culture, the collaboration of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson in 1983 produced the
hit single Say Say Say. The music video accompanying this single depicts McCartney as the salesman selling a dubious strength elixr
from the back of a truck and Jackson as his accomplice amongst the audience.
The practice of selling dubious remedies for real (or imagined) ailments still occurs today, albeit with some updated marketing
techniques. Claims of cures for chronic diseases (for example, diabetes mellitus), for which there are only symptomatic treatments
available from mainstream medicine, are especially common. The term snake oil peddling is used as a derogatory term to describe such
practices."
