TheOther wrote:
Dear_one wrote:
TheOther wrote:
Here is the deal.
Our brains evolved over millions of years to process information and make snap decisions in largely life or death situations. This has been true for all of animal (let alone human) history until maybe 500-200 years ago!
Oh, come on! You can observe stone-age people even today, and they live in groups for mutual protection. Lethal threats are very rare - usually one just has to settle minor differences with relatives.
People rely on feelings because logic is just too slow by orders of magnitude. It can take me years to come up with an obvious explanation for odd behavior, if those were not my habits. Most people never even learn to use logic, and can't distinguish rationality from rationalization. Approximately 10% of professionals really understand their work. The rest are just faking it, like a student taking guesses on a test and trying to find the answers through other associations. I knew an artist who got a job as a taxi driver. He thought he should drive fast, but he crashed because he didn't know how to do it well.
A lot of these traits predate humans, and even mammals! I observe insects killing each other every day, and see plenty of cats and foxes kill mice and birds all of the time. We live in an artificial world of safety that is very modern, and the veil is thin. Not to mention we still see plenty of deadly tribal conflicts today too. Rwanda and Darfur come to mind immediately. In fact, to this very day it is the exception that people of different 'tribes' get along well, especially on first contact.
The reason emotions are faster than logic is because they represent pre-rendered solutions to problems. They already exist, whereas any logical answer to a problem requires the creation of a solution before a solution can be executed. Having pre-rendered solutions is very useful in fast-paced situations! This preference for snap judgement over careful thought exists for a reason. It was self-filtered out via survivor of life's problems, especially in the less civilized past.
People in dangerous professions are not usually on edge all the time. They prepare for the brief exposures. In Rwanda, tribes had been merged into nations and, lacking disease, had drastically over-populated. There was almost equal violence in areas with only one tribe represented. The survivors all remark on how much better life is now, with the worst landlords, etc, gone.
Historically, the majority of people never saw inter-tribal conflict except as border disputes. You can see life as a mutual eating, but the social sciences have moved on. What distinguishes the social species is that most of their communication is about ways to cooperate and work together, not escape danger. There is even evidence in the fossil record of a major volcanic disaster that caused our ancestors to begin trading flint, establishing inter-tribal cooperation as the dawn of real humanity. The Neanderthals were bigger and probably smarter, but never learned to work in large groups.
27 Jun 2019, 9:28 am
