Psience Quest

Quote:One of the oddest things about evolution is the fact we know that it's true. Odder still is the fact that we think it's important. This knowledge is almost entirely useless for our survival, or at least it has been up until very recently, yet we care about it passionately.

Why on earth (where evolution rules) should abstract truth be so important to us? Why should it be even comprehensible? Why on earth would it be to the advantage of a creature to care about the truth in abstract, or to have a grasp of logic, or mathematics? All these capacities had clearly evolved in us long before they were useful. In fact, in the case of mathematics, and of logical reasoning, you can still find earlier and more primitive versions a very short distance under the rational surface of our minds.

We make most of our decisions "irrationally", as we do most of our thinking, based on biased, short-cut heuristics, something which is only surprising in the light of some contemporary myths about rationality. What's really surprising is that we understand that there are other ways to think, and that these other ways – let's group them for a moment under "logical reasoning" – seem, so far as we can tell, to be timeless and objective truths.