I am neither a rocket scientist nor an attorney. My capacity for consuming, understanding, correlating and retaining information has modest limits. I can manage three maybe four bites or bits but beyond that, I need to write things down and revisit my notes. So when I take too many bits and bites it may take a long time and for sure, it will require many reboots and start-overs. If you can, try to step back and separate yourself from from your identity as a human being. Hopefully, that might help avert a self righteous bias. Overestimating one’s own worth is a human attribute that has endured the ages. Let’s start there, human attributes.
The human nervous system is a tightly packaged array of high speed neurons that allows people to use information and facilitate behavior. Since WW2 with the rise of computers and artificial intelligence, the brain has been compared to computers. In less than a human lifetime, the evolution of computers has accelerated at warp speed. By the time a new design is ready for the market place, it is obsolete. On the other hand, the human brain has not received an update in at least 15,000 years. Its anatomy, physiology and operating circuits are no more advanced than the brains of paleolithic nomads to invent stone spearpoints. It is noteworthy to consider, their need for a high speed, fully integrated brain was equal to that required by astronauts and kindergarten teachers in the 21st Century. Their needs were just as many, just as important as ours considering they had to know everything about everything in their little world. There were no specialists, they had to be experts on everything necessary to sustain life. Talk about multitasking, try 24/7. Life was a dangerous endeavor, much, much more so than now. The point; their brains were as modern as ours today.
Moving on; they were modern people physically and mentally. Their body of knowledge was sufficient to their need but it did not include anything that could not be understood with bare hands and the naked eye. That limitation was compounded by a short life expectancy. On top of that, no schools, no books; only oral tradition to perpetuate what for them was life or death knowledge. Our brains now are no different now than theirs were then. In order to survive and reproduce, they knew what they needed to know. Isn’t that what humans do now!
It begs the question, if intellect and reason are paleolithic in structure and function then what about emotions and feelings? I would think (opinion) they share the same backstory. 2020 intellect is playing with new cards but still the same game; do the math, remember what you learned. Likewise, emotion and feelings have new cards but the scope of emotions is relatively narrow in comparison. We haven’t learned new emotions, dealing with the same fear and anger, the same sorrow and joy, the same surprise, disgust and trust. People experience them under different circumstances but the feelings themselves haven’t changed and neither has the way we react.
At the time, emotions were more important to survival than knowledge because we don’t think about the emotion, we act first. We still respond to emotion long before we stop to think about cause & effect or consequences. I believe, that emotion still has more leverage on beliefs and decisions than does knowledge. If the brain hasn’t changed over time, why would humans use intelligence first rather than trusting what feels right? Trust is an emotion, you feel it in your gut. Knowledge can influence trust but you can not intellectualize your way there. Belief is manifest in a high level of trust, placed on something that cannot be proven. Once proven it is no longer a belief. If-Then, (computer logic) if belief depends on a preexisting emotion/feeling, then it supercedes what is reasonable. That is scary.
I want to pick up here some other time. The fast and the slow brain, and I need to explore the nature of Belief in particular and I can’t do that without addressing the evolution of Morality. I suppose that should be titled, Reboot Start-Over 0.2
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