Summary:
Michael Ruse reviewing "Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind" by Ronald de Sousa; thinking is expensive; why think? making choices and the social aspect; Wason test: can't solve simple problems; Plantinga and Darwin's doubt; confidence in our mathematical abilities (March 2008)
Notes:
- most organisms do not think; most organisms certainly not rational; yet they do alright
- rationality not necessarily key to success
- thinking is expensive
- requires big brains; in turns requires lots of protein, "which, outside modern yuppie societies generally means meat"
- Jack Sepkoski: "I see intelligence as just one of a variety of adapations among tetrapods for survival. Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival."
- Why do we think?
- Ruse: need to make more choices
- more choices need to be made because humans have moved into realms where things change constantly (food availability, temperature ranges, predator threats,...); also can't go it alone: choices involving working with others
- few offsprings due to cost of producing thinkers; ensuring survival of offspring requires more thinking
- "As we - and, for much of the journey, other higher mammals - went down the path of big brains, we became better able to be thinkers but more dependent on being thinkers"
- selection produced slightly better brains that led to success and so forth
- de Sousa: human thought not like the calculation of a perfect, all-purpose computer
- we think well in situations where thinking well might be of benefit, and not so well when thinking is irrelevant
- e.g. Wason test
- Alvin Plantinga: what counts in evolution is success and not the truth
- so how can we ever be sure of the truth? perhaps none of our thoughts can tell us about reality; perhaps all like beings in a dream world
- "Darwin's doubt": Darwin: "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
- de Sousa
- our mathematical abilities cannot be result of natural selection; mathematics part of our present rather than our evolutionary past;
- "mathematics can uncover aspects of the universe of which neither the usefulness nor even the existence could possibly have been manifested in the Environment of our Evolutionary Adaptations in which the basic function of the brain were being shaped by natural selection"
- hard to see how it works so well (solution of all sorts of technological and scientific problems) if it isn't true
- de Sousa on irrationality
- we sometimes flub even quite simple calculation;
- e.g. probability of having cancer that affects 0.01% of population having been diagnosed using a test with 98% reliability:
- we panic, but probability is less than 0.5%
- "We can work work out the right answers, but it is not easy - and there is a good reason why it is not easy. Human reason is a faculty evolved to help us survive in certain contexts, rather than reach the truth on every occasion, and historically we have rarely been challenged to work things out at such abstract levels."
- Note to self: this sounds much like Sunnstein's talk on worst-case scenarios
