What kind of person is drawn to conspiracy theories?

[Carl-Richard]

I have a theory (not a conspiracy theory): the people who get strongly drawn to conspiracy theories are the same people who get drawn to supernatural ideas, like God creating the universe from their own predetermined plan (not simply evolving spontaneously through "natural law").

They are fine with explaining reality top down through an elaborate narrative. There is a seeming plan behind everything, behind world politics, behind alien invasions, behind wars, behind ancient history, and they all connect to a grand meta-narrative of control, of manufacturing, of conscious creating, rather than natural systems acting spontaneously.

Those who criticize conspiracy theories point out how that level of organization, of top-down control, is unlikely if not impossible, because of the natural tendency towards spontaneous order and the infeasibility of controlling complex systems. In the "naturalist critique", everybody is a victim of systems, even the supposed people in power, while in the conspiracist's mind, the people in power are the controllers of the systems and the powerless are the victims.

Whether one is more correct than the other is actually hard to say, and a naturalist that claims otherwise would then become a conspiracy theorist in their own right, thinking they have the level of insight and knowledge to be able to predict complex systems.

 

As for myself, as a general predisposition, I've noticed I'm fine with either (naturalism or supernaturalism). While for example Bernardo Kastrup says he is strongly opposed to supernaturalism simply as a personal predisposition (which is why he says he sees no point in doing philosophy if nature is not simply naturalistic; no "God" at the top planning it all, intervening into nature and changing the natural course of things).

But I would also challenge this idea of naturalism, that you could still try to deduce the "laws" behind God's planning so to speak, and it won't be a completely pointless endeavour, simply a more interesting one. Like trying to understand the psychology of God rather than the "physics" of God.

Edited March 12 by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

36 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

While for example Bernardo Kastrup says he is strongly opposed to supernaturalism simply as a personal predisposition

He can lay down reasons why he is against it (I dont think it is just bias)

My understanding is that It mostly has to do with the fact that once you push your priors towards supernaturalism, the set that contains reasonably possible explanations for any given event or phenomena explodes and from then on the flying spaghetti monster wont just be a logically possible thing, but it can become a reasonable thing to consider.

And why is that bad? Well, its harder to pick between hypotheses.

We lack the tools to properly pick between hypotheses already and that just becomes worse once we extend that set of things that we consider.

 

But yeah, updating priors is what we need to do once we are confronted with things that cant be cashed out under naturalism.

36 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

But I would also challenge this idea of naturalism, that you could still try to deduce the "laws" behind God's planning so to speak, and it won't be a completely pointless endeavour, simply a more interesting one. Like trying to understand the psychology of God rather than the "physics" of God

One of the biggest challenges there is gonna be the problem of evil  (if you take God to be a tri-omni God). If thats not the case, then that wont be an issue.

Edited March 12 by zurew

[Cred]

I have written about the topic here: 

One also has to be HSP and ADHD in addition to autistic to be able to come up with a conspiracy theory. 

Dependent on whether the autism dominates, or HSP dominates will change the "flavour" of the theory, with it being more material and logical when you are more autistic and it being more magical when you are dominant HSP.

ADHD is the necessity for unconventionality. 

The reason why you need to be HSP, is because a purely autistic person can only follow instructions. HSP has the ability to ruminate, due to the wiring of their brains, which includes more feedback loops. The ability of the HSP-autistic person is feed a thought back into itself, and coming up with a new thought in that way. When you do that for a long period of time, you will reach conclusions that are far beyond the established knowledge. there has always been these people, they just used to call them, magicians, shamans, and prophets, etc.

Edited March 12 by Cred

[Cred]

48 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Those who criticize conspiracy theories point out how that level of organization, of top-down control, is unlikely if not impossible, because of the natural tendency towards spontaneous order and the infeasibility of controlling complex systems. In the "naturalist critique", everybody is a victim of systems, even the supposed people in power, while in the conspiracist's mind, the people in power are the controllers of the systems and the powerless are the victims.

The way I am currently trying to solve this conflict, is by trying to show, that reality has the attribute of self-similarity like a fractal. If one were to show this, the top down, bottom up distinction with collapse.

My best approach currently, but it is not finished and there are still loose ends, is the idea that reality has "field-like" properties on every level of granularity, and all of existence has "wave-like" properties on every level of granularity.

Every time I'm talking about a "space", on this forum the last few days, what I mean is a bounded field, that allows for a standing wave, which is existence to exist. (everything metaphysically speaking)

Edited March 12 by Cred

[Ramanujan]

Extraverted thinking types  in MBTI are the ones drawn to conspiracy theory. its 2026. the evidence is all over the place. if you still reject conspiracy theories in 2026 , you are a sucker

[Cred]

On 12/03/2026 at 4:47 PM, Cred said:

My best approach currently, but it is not finished and there are still loose ends, is the idea that reality has "field-like" properties on every level of granularity, and all of existence has "wave-like" properties on every level of granularity.

I just found out that something similar exists already and it's called "fields of sense" and is a part of new realism. Coincidentally, it was invented by a guy named Markus Gabriel, who teaches in my city. A childhood friend who studies philosophy even knows the guy.

Edited March 13 by Cred

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

the people who get strongly drawn to conspiracy theories are

Epistemic perverts

[Cred]

7 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Epistemic perverts

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So when examining a conspiracy theory, never make the mistake to ask what it says, ask instead what pattern it points to. when you don't see the pattern, this usually means that you have not looked hard enough or that your interpretation of reality is incomplete.

 

[VioletFlame]

Yes it's all superstitious & mythical thinking. Scientologists, for example, practically have the mental processing/mind of a schizophrenic. 

[Hojo]

People who are comfortable and still in survival mode, Always looking for boogeymen.

Edited March 12 by Hojo

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

Naturalist view definitely seems more grounded to me as it is much more rational and you ussualy need a solid evidence before making a claim, as opposed to supernaturalist claims where you can go haywire with it prior to having any evidence. It is a good thing to be biased towards that type of thinking, generally speaking

[Carl-Richard]

46 minutes ago, NewKidOnTheBlock said:

Naturalist view definitely seems more grounded to me as it is much more rational and you ussualy need a solid evidence before making a claim, as opposed to supernaturalist claims where you can go haywire with it prior to having any evidence. It is a good thing to be biased towards that type of thinking, generally speaking

Not really. Tell that to multiverse theory enthusiasts (who are virtually all naturalists by the way; it's often used as a defense mechanism against the Fine-tuning argument). Not a shred of evidence for a billion billion hidden universes or whatever with all slightly different physical laws. And the very reason why Bernardo Kastrup entertains the supernaturalist position as a naturalist is because there is evidence that threathens his position.

Edited March 12 by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

14 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

And the very reason why Bernardo Kastrup entertains the supernaturalist position as a naturalist is because there is evidence that threathens his position.

Are your referring to the NDE stuff or are you referring to Sheldrake stuff?

I know one possible out when it comes to one of Sheldrake's studies - John Vervaeke managed to give a reply that is consistent with the naturalist view and once that additional thing was considered it rendered the ability back to just chance and it wasnt better than just guess.

 

I will look into that NDE stuff because that sounded interesting, and I am also looking into fine-tuning stuff , my issue there is just that there is a fuck ton of things that one needs to know to even have the ability to track  and to make sense of some of the arguments there.

 

Edited March 12 by zurew

[Carl-Richard]

5 hours ago, VioletFlame said:

Yes it's all superstitious & mythical thinking.

Not really. It's about being top-down vs bottom-up, narrative-driven vs detail-driven, holistic vs analytic. You can be perfectly capable of rationality at either style. It's just a different orientation of the rationality, of what you decide to focus on. But of course, supernaturalism tends to appear at earlier stages of development, because cognition is efficient at dealing with narratives, less so with details.

Edited March 12 by Carl-Richard

[Willy Phallicus]

The naturalist and the conspiracy theorist are both half right and half wrong.

For example, the conspiracy theorist wants to tell us that planet durp is an absolute contrivance of elitist and evil Black Popes.  He is wrong about that but elitist, evil black popes do exist and humans are a resource like any other.

As for who is specifically drawn to them (based on your correlation) I'd say open minded people but that's a double edged sword.

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, zurew said:

Are your referring to the NDE stuff or are you referring to Sheldrake stuff?

NDE stuff. I think most of Sheldrake's stuff (parapsychology and morphic resonance) is actually consistent with a naturalist conception of reality (Bernardo's conception; spontaneous at the bottom layer). He is mainly just challenging the idea that laws of nature are fixed (which doesn't necessarily allow for divine intervention, only that the laws might change slightly over time). But I think I remember he believes in divine intervention as well judging by his talks with Bernardo where he claimed something like God can have a plan (which would also be consistent with his Christian leanings, of course depending on how you define Christian again, that's always a problem, and I'm not just being a Peterson about this).

 

6 hours ago, zurew said:

I know one possible out when it comes to one of Sheldrake's studies - John Vervaeke managed to give a reply that is consistent with the naturalist view and once that additional thing was considered it rendered the ability back to just chance and it wasnt better than just guess.

What was that specifically?

 

6 hours ago, zurew said:

I will look into that NDE stuff because that sounded interesting, and I am also looking into fine-tuning stuff , my issue there is just that there is a fuck ton of things that one needs to know to even have the ability to track  and to make sense of some of the arguments there.

The Fine-tuning argument, in my limited knowledge of it (or rather almost purely intuitive understanding of it), never made much sense to me. Like the universe is the way it is, and if it wasn't like this, it might've been different or not been able to exist, therefore it must have been planned? Couldn't you just add infinite time to the equation and perhaps Sheldrake's idea of laws not being fixed and then over time, this universe is inevitable? Or is it that it being planned is more parsimonious than simply adding infinite time to spontaneous order and slight changes in constants over time? But isn't infinite time already the case (or what's the loophole there)? I don't know.

Edited March 13 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

12 hours ago, zurew said:

He can lay down reasons why he is against it (I dont think it is just bias)

My understanding is that It mostly has to do with the fact that once you push your priors towards supernaturalism, the set that contains reasonably possible explanations for any given event or phenomena explodes and from then on the flying spaghetti monster wont just be a logically possible thing, but it can become a reasonable thing to consider.

And why is that bad? Well, its harder to pick between hypotheses.

We lack the tools to properly pick between hypotheses already and that just becomes worse once we extend that set of things that we consider.

I mean you can say that in principle, but as a fact, you don't know the actual plan of God, and that plan can be studied, and you might find out that it unfolds only in a certain way that only fits with a few narrow hypotheses. 

It's not like NDEs are without coherence or substance. They are highly structured, highly meaningful. That's when the naturalism collapses into the supernaturalism, in that you can start giving an account for what is happening that is supposedly supernatural. What Bernardo calls supernatural is really just due to a sort of paradigm-locked version of naturalism, that relies on current assumptions about how reality works. Once we can explain how NDEers see without eyes, that becomes a part of the naturalist framework.

The notion of "spontaneous" assumes the notion of law or principle that guides the spontaneity (or else there would be no structure). Once you uncover the law, you can call the products of the law spontaneous. That's what we do with human minds (Sam Harris style): it's not really free will (and being an author of thoughts, ideas, desires, plans), it's the illusion of free will, but it's really just nature acting spontaneously through a set of laws (brains, neurons firing, atoms colliding, etc.). When we do it with God's mind and its plans, we have recapitulated the "acting spontaneously through a set of laws".

Edited March 13 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

5 minutes ago, enzyme said:

People who want to look smart.  It's an ego thing.

As are those who try to debunk the conspiracy theorists, or what?

[Sucuk Ekmek]

They benefit from conspiracy, it's hard to work with coincident theories.

[zurew]

12 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

What was that specifically?

It was solved by the hypothesis that your subsconscious mind can pick up on very complex patterns.

In this specific case it was about introducing people(who needs to stare at you) in a pseduo random manner and it turned out that the subconscious can actually pick up on the fact that it wasnt actually random and just from that info they managed to guess better (even if they couldnt consciously recognize the fact that their subconscious actually picked up on the introducing rhythm).

After they adjusted and after they didnt give any feedback anymore  (after each round about whether they managed to guess the staring right or not), the chance went back down to 50%.

12 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The Fine-tuning argument, in my limited knowledge of it (or rather almost purely intuitive understanding of it), never made much sense to me.

 

Quote

Its very complicated , and it has to do mostly with bayesian reasoning , but some versions includes complex abductive reasoning.

The thing I currently dont like is the fact that most theists run the argument in an unfair way, where they just add a bunch of facts to God's psychology and after you add those facts, of course God will try to create the Universe like this and then they compared that to a shit version of naturalism where it is done by randomness.  But the same ad hoc move can be done by naturalists, where you just add random predispositional facts to the laws of nature or to the meta-laws that then can explain why the Universe is this way rather than some other way.

There are also issues with higher order fine-tuning, where if you bake in certain things about God's psychology, then you need to explain why God has that kind of psychology rather than any other psychology and who or what fine-tuned that? If you take that psychology as a brute fact where there isn't any explanation in principle, then my issue is that I dont see why couldn't we just do that move at the level of the Universe ,why do we need to go one level of abstraction higher to say that the given fine-tuning doesnt need any further explanation.

Once you strip away those added facts about God's psychology, the set of things that God could desire explodes and if it is the case that God can create any logically possible world (where he isn't constrained by nomological laws), then the probability of him creating this kind of Universe becomes practically equal to randomness.

--

There is a lot more that can be said about this, but I will need to get read up on this, because it seems to be the case that people who starts out thinking that the argument is trash, some of them flip their opinion once they get actually informed about the underlying problems and issues.

 

8 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I mean you can say that in principle, but as a fact, you don't know the actual plan of God, and that plan can be studied, and you might find out that it unfolds only in a certain way that only fits with a few narrow hypotheses.

What I said there was just a pragmatic argument mostly, it doesnt show that what you said cant be true or that it is less probable, it just states once we make the move towards supernatualism, epistemically we get more fucked because it becomes much harder to make sense of things and to predict things.

 

Here I question what you gain by affirming supernaturalism:

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1) The harder sense making isn't just about not necessarily understanding God's plan, but it is also about adjusting your priors to other supernatural entities and stuff exiting and or the laws changing . If you just take God to be the Universe consciously intervening and interacting  with parts of itself, the issue surrounding this will go back to the point I layed down about the fine-tuning and about baking in predispositional facts about God's psychology rather than baking in those facts about the naturalist paradigm. Its unclear how NDE happening this way rather than any other way is more expected under supernaturalism than just under naturalism and if it is not more expected, then I dont see what would motivate the move towards supernaturalism.

2) Its unclear to me, what you gain by affirming supernaturalism, but depending on how you define it , its clear to me what you lose by affirming it. For instance, if you take supernaturalism to mean God being the Universe and it also having the ability to change the laws or to act despite those laws, then you introduced uncertainty (unless you know when and why God wants to adjust the laws or act despite those laws). But then I can just compare that with a type of naturalism where you can go with the laws changing because of some kind of higher order law or  I can just say that the laws never changed or will change , its just that we dont understand the laws well enough yet and thats why it seemed like they changed (this is epistemically better , because this dodges the introduced uncertainty). 

So even if we assume that God's psychology is perfectly knowable , even in that scenario (if you want to maintain your ability predict things) what you have is supernaturalism,  where you need to know the laws + God's psychology vs naturalism where you only need to know the laws . The question in this case is just what you gain by going with supernaturalism there?

Here I give further reasons to why reject it:

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The other reason why it epistemically fucks you up (independent from the fact whether you know God's psychology or not) is the fact, that once you take it that God has meta-cognition without it needing to go through a developmental process (like evolution or something similar) to develop that meta-cognition and you also take it that God is disembodied -  then with that move you also open up the door to other disembodied entities having meta-cognition from the start as well. Thats where you open up the door to all sorts of supernatural stuff like ghosts, demons, other invisible entities (that can possibly interact with you and with the world in a causal way). This is why I said in my previous post yesterday, that this makes it so that you need to entertain much more possible hypotheses for any given pnemona or event and it makes your ability to make sense of things much harder.

For instance, if and when your shoe goes missing - you dont just need to check whether your dog stole it or not , you need to also entertain the possibility that there are shoe-stealing invisible fairies.

If you take it that God isn't disembodied then the the point about meta-cognition still goes through (and then we still need to completely readjust our conception of what is needed for something to have meta-cognition and that has potential other issues) but aside from that;  I dont understand what it would mean for God to be embodied and then to create the Universe or to change the laws - because under the naturalistic conception of God the Universe is just God and the laws is how God unfolds, but in the supernatural conception of God  - he supervenes on those laws and I dont understand what it means to be those laws and to also supervene on those laws. 

 

-----

And yes, I agree with the thing you layed down about naturalism adjusting. Its unclear how we even define these terms in the firstplace and we are possibly challenging the edges and talking past each other. One thing is that there are always moves avalaible in order to maintain naturalism, but not at 0 cost. If I need to give a 1000 auxiliary hypothesis to explain the same set of facts (the set that supernaturalism could explain with one relatively simple hypothesis) then eventually it can become really intellectually dishonest and pressing to leave the fucking naturalist paradigm.

 

Sorry this was a lot, but if you want we can go through this by one piece at a time.

Edit: Added quotes so it can be closed and it wont take up half the page.

Edited March 13 by zurew