Obbe
Alan What?
[annoy my right-angled speediness]
Are most people "wired" to think logically or illogically? Which way of thinking had the greater evolutionary advantage?
Imagine you were a primitive cave man sitting by his fire. You heard a rustling in the bushes. Logically, you could conclude that the rustling was most likely just the wind. But there is always the chance that it could be some monster preparing to jump out and eat you. Those who thought illogically and prepared to react to the unknown may have had an advantage in such a situation.
As a side note, much of enjoyable modern culture (art, music, etc) is a result of illogical thinking. What does it mean to be very opposed to illogical thinking?
Tough question. I would say abstract thought is more advantageous than illogical though but its a thin line between the two.
Also, to say that the logical option is to think russling is the wind is not a good example. What if you felt no wind? How would that conclusion be logically sound?
logic =/= the first thing that pops into your head.
It seems obvious that a logical agent will always have the advantage, in the limit, compared to the illogical agent. It's not "logical" to ignore potential survival risks unless the cost of reacting is greater, on weighted average, than ignoring them.
None of our ancestors and none of us are purely logical agents though, so among a field of "illogical" behaviours there are clearly some which confer advantage. So like our heuristic response to multi-arm bandit scenarios (e.x. do I forage the same place as yesterday where I found food or do I experiment), there's a logical optimum but you need pretty sophisticated mathematics to work it out. If some of our ancestors had the necessary mental abilities and had behaved as logically as possible then they would undoubtedly have survived better than those using the typical dopamine fueled reward/novelty tradeoff strategy. But like, that wasn't an option so what we get instead is "instincts" that work pretty well.
Since I'm claiming that higher logical capacity is going to almost always be a survival advantage I anticipate someone saying "then why didn't we evolve to be more logical" and the answer should be obvious. Evolution is not a process which produces global optimums, there needs to be a series of mutations/recombinations from some ancestral state to some future state wherein each generation has non-negative non-negative advantage relative to it's parents. Evolution by natural selection doesn't really provide a mechanism for descending from a local optimum to reach something higher. This is the same idea that irreducible complexity rests on (which gets bashed unfairly, it's actually a perfectly valid argument it just doesn't work out a posteri), having eyes costs something in complexity/energy consumption, if eyes evolved by natural selection then every phase of proto-eyes had to confer some survival advantage and it's hard to imagine a spontaneous mutation that produces a useful proto-eye (eyes being very complex, requiring changes in the brain as well as exterior physiology).
