Why Think? The Evolution of the Rational Mind | Date: 15 April 2011, 16:55
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Insects can see lightwaves that we cannot. Bats have skills in echolocation. Dogs famously can sniff out things that in our noses don't register a bit. But we humans: we think. We even think rationally, at least sometimes. It must do us some good. So just why do we do it? _Why Think?: Evolution and the Rational Mind_ (Oxford University Press) is the answer from philosopher Ronald de Sousa. This is not a lengthy book, but is full of ideas, tightly compressed. It is not easy reading, at least it was not for me; when de Sousa, for instance, starts splitting rationality into the strategic mode and the epistemic mode, it seems that he is using terms familiar to others in his school of thought, and then he introduces the axiological mode. If this is unfamiliar territory, you may well have to read entire pages of de Sousa's pithy prose a couple of times to have it sink in. The rewards are that you might well have a new appreciation for just how special our rational capacities are, just how lucky we are that they work as well as they do, and just how they might have come to be produced by natural selection.
If we are rational, it only came as a process through time. De Sousa looks at this in two ways. There are those who think that the human zygote, the first cell of a human, the union of the sperm and egg, is as much a human being as those folks you see walking on the street. But no one will argue that that teensy zygote, full human or not, is rational. Rationality (however it is to be defined) comes sometime later. De Sousa writes, "The evolutionary perspective maintains that life arouse about four billions of years ago from chemical conditions that are still not fully understood, but of which one can safely presume that they included no phenomena that could be labeled either rational or irrational." At some point, a being capable of reasoning arose. De Sousa gives two capacities that were crucial steps toward rationality. One was the capacity to represent objects mentally, not just to detect them with our senses. The other was the capacity not just to give an automatic response toward attractive stimuli or away from aversive ones, but to form desires and intentions and to act upon them. The two combine in the great way we have advantage over other creatures; De Sousa quotes Karl Popper that "rational method consists in letting our hypotheses die in our stead." In other words, we can do thought experiments, modeling what might happen if we decided to run into a theater without paying for our ticket, and being content with the results of the model rather than trying the act in real life. Our capacity for rationality, however, can make us prone to irrationality; De Sousa spends a chapter discussing superstition, and especially our inability to calculate probabilities realistically.
Reason has helped us in certain contexts. Many of the decisions we make now, to be completely rational, have to be made at highly abstract levels of logic and even mathematics. It is not surprising that our brains don't face every problem with full rationality; they were busy solving problems in other ways in the past. De Sousa gives full appreciation to the value of emotion in our reasoning: "The emotional plea, `Don't confuse me with the facts!' is not always wholly absurd." Emotion may allow us to ignore excessive information, and even when trying to predict outcomes, emotion may color the values which we plug into whatever mental equation we are attempting. 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. De Sousa joins with those who understand that we rarely perform explicitly the calculations of maximums in economics or game theory. Our wonderful eyesight evolved in ways that can't help making us victims to optical illusions, and our higher minds are a collection of similarly fallible skills. It's a humane approach to the problem of rationality. De Sousa draws upon many examples from wide-ranging disciplines, from John Horton Conway's cellular automata game of Life to the Paper, Scissors, Rock game to the reasoning skills of a nest of foraging ants. There is plenty of depth here for those of a formal philosophical bent, leavened with wit and remarkable insight.
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