Cognitive Thrift 58 – Trial-and-Error
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/02/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I think in a lot of ways – basically, trial and error –
Rick Rosner: Let me mention another thing, in addition to evolutionary sufficiency, part of evolutionary sufficiency is a buffer against error. If you – your heart is designed to go for 80 or 100 years in most cases without screwing up over that period of time because an error for your heart can be fatal, and if people suffer enough fatal errors, then that’s going to screw up the species because everybody is going to be dying of heart attacks.
Jacobsen: I think there’s an aspect of the beliefs before: ghosts, UFOs, angels, devils, heaven, hell, and the way they relate to individuals and to groups. They can be taken as trial and error heuristics.
If you do one thing, then x, y, or z good thing will tend to happen to you. These can get codified into belief systems. That might play into what we’ve talked about in other discourses about the compactification of information in the brain.
Rosner: I think what you’re arguing is that gods, ghosts, angels. Anything whose existence is hard to substantiate are a consequence of the brain wanting to find patterns. You said not to use – but the brain finds patterns or looks for explanations.
We want to understand the world. We want explanation. If it is 5,000 or 8,000 years ago and we understand very little about the world, then a primitive joke to make is to invent gods for a lot of stuff.
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