Cognitive Thrift 55 – Evolutionary Sufficiency
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One of the principles is evolutionary sufficiency. We can talk about the limitations on thought and perception.
Rick Rosner: For every part of the body, there’s evolutionary sufficiency, which is that everything works as well as it needs to and just a little bit better.
Just because if things didn’t work than they needed to work due to random variation then you’d have things breaking down and you’d have things not working, you’d have things falling below – with an error rate that would work against the species.
So, evolution provides a push that things should have a sufficiently low error rate that it doesn’t kill off members of the species to the point where it then hurts the species, which means that organisms don’t generally fall apart until after reproductive age and things tend to work as well as they need to work and a little bit better to allow for variation in function and all that.
So when it comes to perception and thought, we have limits. There’s a mythology that the thinking doesn’t have limits. There’s that saying that we use only 10% of our brains, which is probably 100 years old and stems from some misunderstanding that is generations old and it is generally not true, and if we can get by with using only 10% of our brains, then why do so many people go crazy.
We need all of our brains to deal with the demands of life. Also, 10% of our brains. That kind of idea contradicts the idea of evolutionary sufficiency. Our brains function as well as need them to plus maybe a little bit more, which is not to say that we have 90% unused capacity.
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