Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
You must be talking about primitive humans because for tens of thousands of years humans have been embracing and growing their capacity to think and plan in increasingly complex ways. We'd still be living in caves and eating animals we killed ourselves if as you say our brains abhor complexity and conscious thinking. Many modern human beings including yourself don't abhor complexity, they seek it.
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Not at all. I may not have stated it well.
Overall, our brains are optimized in terms of minimizing energy consumption vs ability to the point that it literally defies description. Conscious thinking only accounts for maybe 1% of your brains activity. Though of course, we'd all like to believe otherwise and most do. Generally speaking, your brain relies on a myriad of shortcuts to circumvent conscious thinking, solely to conserve energy... and I offered one example in that our brains are hardwired for not only identifying causality, but more importantly, to identify a single cause... a single, simple answer. And that single answer is enough. Right or wrong or incomplete is irrelevant. Democrats = Good, Republicans = Bad. School shooting = violent video games, this food = good, that food = bad etc etc etc etc etc. These are never real answers as the answers typically tend to be incredibly complex and require a great deal of careful consideration, research, thinking, debate etc... but these answers are good enough for your brain to accept and move on which will then allow it to stop wasting valuable energy lost to pointless contemplation which do not further its objectives of reproduction and survival. Not valuable energy in 2014 terms of you just read a great book and it made you do a lot of soul searching (your brain was taking full advantage of its optimized systems while doing that anyway). Valuable energy in the sense of many millions of years of evolution, facing feast or famine, stalking the wounded animal for 3 days until you can kill it and eat, sense... but that is still the organ we have today and the multi-million year reality which it is adapted to deal with. Our very large brain came at a very large cost in terms of energy consumption, which it also had to adapt to. Compared to primates, we are born a year early ONLY because of the size of our brains (which continues to grow after birth). Unlike any other animal, we are helpless for roughly the first decades of our lives ONLY because of the size of our brain and its incomplete development at birth.
A better way to say what I meant may be that our brains are wired to generally avoid the energy cost of complex conscious thinking. It will simply search for the most simple, "makes sense" explanation and move on. That we always buy into it 100% is simply part of the complex illusion that we live in.
Illusionists as an example, take advantage of your brains hardwired energy saving shortcuts in countless ways. The most common of which I am sure are those which exploit the many many assumptions of the visual system and visual processing.