Like Maxwell’s daemon in physics, many control gateways at the particle level. In people especially sick people, we have daemons that we call demons: my voices, my nasty thoughts, my bad dreams, my wicked demons. These too are programs, mental programs, that are not friendly housekeepers. They are likely hangovers from early sentience or reptile phases of brain evolution, survival mechanisms from a grimmer past. Damage or die was the survival strategy in the reptile ages, none of your warm and cuddly stuff. Now hard wired into us, deep in the limbic system around the brain stem.
With evolving internal gestation and motherhood as a new strategy, new service programs were needed to replace the reptile demons: calling them damons for now, the new damons reacted well to symmetry and big wide eyes, feeding needs in the young, to virtue and beauty in all their growing forms. Those with strong damons thrived, those without languished and still languish: the poor ye will always have with you, unless fMRI-type scans can diagnose weaknesses and omega three and cousins can reach them.
In sleeptime, the housekeeping daemons refurbish, clearing out, storing and resetting. They can do it in eight hours of darkness, or in catnaps for the tree dwellers whose enemies include gravity, snakes and nocturnal predators. Thinking prime ministers and professors, catnaps are a survival strength.
There are few mental processes, aptitudes, attitudes and personality traits that cannot be explained by this daemon hypothesis. If not for the negative hooks in the name, we could call it daemon theory.
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