Peace Through Understanding

How evolutionary psychology enables us to stop thinking it’s personal

A small person practicing for when they are older. Image credit: The Telegraph

When people debate whether or not Artificial Intelligence programs can ever be considered “conscious” or not, I can’t help but marvel at the fact we humans so readily ascribe to ourselves qualities we in fact rarely possess. Even the most cursory observation of human behavior serves to indicate that most of us are at best intermittently semi-conscious. Generally speaking, we sleepwalk through existence utilizing a repertoire of hardwired behaviors over which we have little or no control. As the realization of this fact would be deeply uncomfortable and therefore maladaptive, our brains are structured so as to create an illusion of purposefulness. As we live inside our brains, we’re easily fooled by this illusion and we automatically ignore all the gaps and missing pieces that would, if we paid attention to them, serve to indicate how threadbare and highly fallible our internal representations truly are.

While this mental trick served our ancestors well, they lived very different lives from us. For nearly all of our evolutionary history life was a zero-sum game and prone to all manner of exogenous shocks. As such, our ancestors had to be a great deal less sentimental than we frequently are, and far less prone to indulging fanciful illusions about how people…