Cognitive Thrift 45 – Evolved Objectives
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have evolved objectives. What objectives?
Rick Rosner: After messing around, we are finally ready to talk about the motivations and objectives and, to use game theoretic terms, the payoffs of our evolutionary history. Much of it is simply to survive.
Some of it is to reproduce. Sometimes those things conflict with each other, but regardless we want things. But wanting and getting those things amounts to a payoff or a payout or a – a payoff.
There’s evolutionary sufficiency, which is we’re pretty much only as good at the things we want to do as we need to be under the – to conform with – to do what we need to do in nature and in society as long as our ability to do things in society are the result evolution.
Or our capacities to do things in society are the result of evolution. We mostly evolved to survive in nature and we got so good in nature that we were able to build a complex society and society also it is arguable about whether society has been around long enough to make much of a difference in our evolved capabilities so for the most part our abilities to survive in the city are just kind of a byproduct of our ability to survive in nature.
Any abilities above and beyond that are kind of accidental due to the persistence of characteristics. If you design a car for the last ten years, it is likely that it will last for eleven years or twelve years or 14 years, but not a 150 years. There’s some available capacity that – but all of it is the result of evolutionary pressure.
And which means that we have limited resources to do what we want to do. We can’t run a mile in two minutes, even though some animals could run that fast for short distances. There’s wasn’t sufficient pressure on us to develop that ability.
We can’t calculate three-digit numbers in our heads because there wasn’t evolutionary pressure to do that, nor is it an easy enough ability to have by accident as a result of evolutionary pressure.
Excess capacity does not give us too much excess capacity. We are limited in our abilities because we’ve evolved to only have limited abilities that are only as good as they need to be plus a little more by accident.
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