Utility I

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The universe is not constituted to make human beings happy. Instead, human minds have developed in order to be functional and happy inside of and despite the universe. So we shouldn’t expect a better understanding of the functioning of the universe to make us any happier.

In some ways the material universe has qualities that act against our happiness and functionality. It is complicated and hard to understand. It doesn’t have any clear purpose. Our minds have developed ways to fool us in order to get around these problems. Our minds are analogous to early 8 bit 16k home computers–they don’t have the capacity to be programmed to do everything the programmer would like, so the programmer finds ways to cut corners by simulating certain processes or calculations without actually doing them. Anyone who has played a text adventure game with a limited parser has experienced this–the frustration of trying to communicate with a program that is only designed to simulate communication.

Thus we are constantly abbreviating, summarizing, finding ways to compress and model data. This is nowhere more apparent than in our cultural ways of understanding social relations, the most complex aspects of reality since they involve the most complex material artifacts, human brains. We invent things like nations, social classes and professions to summarize and simplify what are really collections of many individual human beings with similar ideas and assumptions in their brains.

Essentially, our brains have evolved to allow us to function, not to allow us to correctly perceive reality. Often this amounts to the same thing–those who see reality more clearly survive while those who perceive incorrectly die. Sometimes this is not the same thing, however. Illusions give us motivation and help us make sense of parts of our world that are too complex to understand without summarization and abstraction. Illusions help us survive where accurate knowledge of the material facts would be ineffective or counterproductive. So why should it come as any surprise that our minds constantly lie to us?