Allan Milne Lees
1 min readJul 15, 2020

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As Dawkins wrote, Keats' lament about Newton "unweaving the rainbow" was always quite wrong; science enables us to perceive wonders unimaginable by the limited human brain. We still, however, blunder and one such mis-step is the notion that the question "what is it all for?" has any meaning. In fact, such questions are category errors, no different from asking "what's the meaning of yellow" or "why is cold?" These cognitive dead-ends arise from the fact we're a primate group species hardwired for theory of mind, and so we automatically interpret things in terms of primate group dynamics. The universe, however, defeats this hardwiring and so if we want to understand it, and experience its wonders, we need to leave behind our desire to impose primate-oriented "meaning" on non-primate phenomenon.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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