- #1
adriaanb
- 6
- 0
Newton said it, 'If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants'.
People still think humans are so clever, I don't believe it. Our brains stumbled upon the power of parallel processing, through a language interface. We can benefit from the thoughts of all the people around us and before us. Which got even more efficient through writing, then book printing and now internet.
So we tend to think that the achievement of the whole reflects on us as an individual, like an ant looking at the hill and saying 'look what I built!'. But we ignore the fact that there isn't a single person alive that could invent a knife from scratch, let alone an Iphone.
This overestimation of our capacity is making us think way too complicated about our own motivations. We are guided by straightforward instinctive goals just like all the other species in the animal kingdom. We just use a bigger brain to achieve them.
Many of our behaviours are pre-programmed, some even to come out at the right time. Take teens fighting with parents. Finally some researchers found a link between the amygdala in teens and fighting with parents:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=4340870&page=1"
But it doesn't occur to them that maybe the fighting is the point. Built into get the parents to separate from the children. Why do you think a bird nudges its young out of the nest at some point? I don't think it says 'Kid, it is time for you to spread your wings and live your own life!' It probably just feels it needs some more space, or get rid of that awful mess.
I was just wondering if anyone had some thoughts on this, let's do some parallel processing here..
People still think humans are so clever, I don't believe it. Our brains stumbled upon the power of parallel processing, through a language interface. We can benefit from the thoughts of all the people around us and before us. Which got even more efficient through writing, then book printing and now internet.
So we tend to think that the achievement of the whole reflects on us as an individual, like an ant looking at the hill and saying 'look what I built!'. But we ignore the fact that there isn't a single person alive that could invent a knife from scratch, let alone an Iphone.
This overestimation of our capacity is making us think way too complicated about our own motivations. We are guided by straightforward instinctive goals just like all the other species in the animal kingdom. We just use a bigger brain to achieve them.
Many of our behaviours are pre-programmed, some even to come out at the right time. Take teens fighting with parents. Finally some researchers found a link between the amygdala in teens and fighting with parents:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=4340870&page=1"
But it doesn't occur to them that maybe the fighting is the point. Built into get the parents to separate from the children. Why do you think a bird nudges its young out of the nest at some point? I don't think it says 'Kid, it is time for you to spread your wings and live your own life!' It probably just feels it needs some more space, or get rid of that awful mess.
I was just wondering if anyone had some thoughts on this, let's do some parallel processing here..
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