[ExI] Meta question

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 9:49 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

snip
>
> And you can add in that even when humans think they are being
> rational, they're not.

You can make a case that more human mental effort is expended on
rationalizing than on rational thinking.

> Human thinking is driven by emotion, brain cludges, wrong beliefs,
> logical fallacies, etc.

At least the emotion drives and brain kludges are the result of
genetic selections.  "Wrong beliefs" are elements of culture, memes.
With effort those can be sorted out.  Recent example discussed here is
circumcision.  Clearly a meme, largely in the religious category.  An
impressive example of the spread of this meme is the fact that South
Korea has an exceptionally high rate, this mutilation meme being
passed from US culture of the 50s to the South Koreans.

> Humans are not rational.

While that's true, most human behavior is fairly rational, especially
if you include the long range view of human genes.  What we need to
understand is conditional behaviors.  Battered wife, fraternity
hazing, military basic training, and SMBD are diverse and hard to
account for until you understand them all as aspects of
capture-bonding.  In turn, the evolution of the mental mechanisms
behind capture-bonding makes sense in the environment in which humans
evolved.

Keith