Download Free rare ebooks here in ebooksplug no nonsense, just deal with it. Ebooks listed here is for preview purposes only if you like the book after you read the preview here you have to delete the file and buy the original one in their respective stores.
Randomize books
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Why Think? The Evolution of the Rational Mind
Author(s): Ronald de Sousa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date : 2007
Insects can see lightwaves that we cannot. Bats have skills in echolocation. Dogs famously can sniff out things that in our noses don't register a bit. But we humans: we think. We even think rationally, at least sometimes. It must do us some good. So just why do we do it? _Why Think?: Evolution and the Rational Mind_ (Oxford University Press) is the answer from philosopher Ronald de Sousa. This is not a lengthy book, but is full of ideas, tightly compressed. It is not easy reading, at least it was not for me; when de Sousa, for instance, starts splitting rationality into the strategic mode and the epistemic mode, it seems that he is using terms familiar to others in his school of thought, and then he introduces the axiological mode. If this is unfamiliar territory, you may well have to read entire pages of de Sousa's pithy prose a couple of times to have it sink in. The rewards are that you might well have a new appreciation for just how special our rational capacities are, just how lucky we are that they work as well as they do, and just how they might have come to be produced by natural selection.
If we are rational, it only came as a process through time. De Sousa looks at this in two ways. There are those who think that the human zygote, the first cell of a human, the union of the sperm and egg, is as much a human being as those folks you see walking on the street. But no one will argue that that teensy zygote, full human or not, is rational. Rationality (however it is to be defined) comes sometime later. De Sousa writes, "The evolutionary perspective maintains that life arouse about four billions of years ago from chemical conditions that are still not fully understood, but of which one can safely presume that they included no phenomena that could be labeled either rational or irrational." At some point, a being capable of reasoning arose. De Sousa gives two capacities that were crucial steps toward rationality. One was the capacity to represent objects mentally, not just to detect them with our senses. The other was the capacity not just to give an automatic response toward attractive stimuli or away from aversive ones, but to form desires and intentions and to act upon them. The two combine in the great way we have advantage over other creatures; De Sousa quotes Karl Popper that "rational method consists in letting our hypotheses die in our stead." In other words, we can do thought experiments, modeling what might happen if we decided to run into a theater without paying for our ticket, and being content with the results of the model rather than trying the act in real life. Our capacity for rationality, however, can make us prone to irrationality; De Sousa spends a chapter discussing superstition, and especially our inability to calculate probabilities realistically.
Reason has helped us in certain contexts. Many of the decisions we make now, to be completely rational, have to be made at highly abstract levels of logic and even mathematics. It is not surprising that our brains don't face every problem with full rationality; they were busy solving problems in other ways in the past. De Sousa gives full appreciation to the value of emotion in our reasoning: "The emotional plea, `Don't confuse me with the facts!' is not always wholly absurd." Emotion may allow us to ignore excessive information, and even when trying to predict outcomes, emotion may color the values which we plug into whatever mental equation we are attempting. Human reason is a faculty evolved to help us survive in certain contexts, rather than reach the truth on every occasion, and historically we have rarely been challenged to work things out at such abstract levels. De Sousa joins with those who understand that we rarely perform explicitly the calculations of maximums in economics or game theory. Our wonderful eyesight evolved in ways that can't help making us victims to optical illusions, and our higher minds are a collection of similarly fallible skills. It's a humane approach to the problem of rationality. De Sousa draws upon many examples from wide-ranging disciplines, from John Horton Conway's cellular automata game of Life to the Paper, Scissors, Rock game to the reasoning skills of a nest of foraging ants. There is plenty of depth here for those of a formal philosophical bent, leavened with wit and remarkable insight.
DownloadDownload
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Blog Archive
-
▼
2010
(1114)
-
▼
September
(260)
- 201 Best Questions To Ask On Your Interview
- 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions
- Eat Pray Love
- Sins of a Wicked Duke
- Rain Gardens - A How-to Manual For Homeowners
- Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't
- Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It...
- Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Betw...
- The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teac...
- Beginning OpenGL Game Programming 2nd Edition
- Pleasure Control (Pleasure Games)
- The Love Spell: An Erotic Memoir of Spiritual Awak...
- Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Books 1-12
- Tempt Me Tonight
- Odd Hours - Dean Koontz
- Tuesdays with Morrie
- Circle of Magic - Tamora Pierce
- Kushiel's Mercy (Kushiel's Legacy)
- Anne Rice - The Vampire Chronicles Books 1 -10
- Wilbur Smith Mega Collection - 33 Books
- I Too Had A Love Story...
- The Unincorporated
- The Stone Child
- The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories
- Overwinter: A Werewolf Tale
- Once on a Moonless Night
- Foxy Lady: A Cougar Falls Story
- Marvel Encyclopedia Volume 1 (HC)
- Bayou Moon
- Venom - Jennifer Estep
- Namesake - Marie Harte
- The Dragons' Demon
- From the Dead - Mark Billingham
- Encyclopedia of Insects
- Universe (Britannica Illustrated Science Library)
- Technology (Britannica Illustrated Science Library)
- Longman illustrated animal encyclopedia - Mammals
- The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Science of Every...
- CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics
- Human Body II (Britannica Illustrated Science Libr...
- Student World Atlas
- Encyclopedia of English Language
- The Encyclopedia of World History. Sixth Edition
- Human Body I (Britannica Illustrated Science Library)
- 100 Greatest Science Discoveries of All Time
- High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs
- Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, 10 Edition
- The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Spells
- Tied and True
- Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Sc...
- Various Books On Hacking By Ankit Fadia
- 160 banned books collection
- Algorithms and Data Structures in VLSI Design: OBD...
- PC Upgrade and Repair Bible
- The Complete Idiot's Guide to Magic Tricks
- The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading: A Comprehensi...
- The Essential Underground Handbook
- World's Funniest Proverbs
- Playback - Raymond Chandler
- The Little Sister - Raymond Chandler
- Stormbreaker - Anthony Horowitz
- Eagle Strike - Anthony Horowitz
- Scorpia - Anthony Horowitz
- Skeleton Key
- Ark Angel
- Crocodile Tears
- No Mercy - Sherrilyn Kenyon
- Lost Empire: A Fargo Adventure
- Divided Souls - Gabriella Poole
- Damaged - Cathy Glass
- Biomedical Acupuncture for Sports and Trauma Rehab...
- Life After Trauma, Second Edition: A Workbook for ...
- Laurie Halse Anderson - Wintergirls(MP3)
- Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
- The Hunger Game
- Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games...
- Zeitoun - Dave Eggers
- To Kill A Mockingbird
- The Midnight House
- The Faithful Spy
- The Shadow of the Wind
- The Silent Man
- The Ghost War
- The Big Sleep
- At the Gates of Darkness: Book Two of the Demonwar...
- Legacy - Jeanne C. Stein
- Persuader: A Reacher Novel
- The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove: A Novel
- The Fall of the Templars: A Novel
- The Darkest Whisper
- The Darkest Pleasure
- The Vaults - Toby Ball
- The Yellow House: A Novel
- Bad Blood - Mari Mancusi
- Boys that Bite - Mari Mancusi
- Girls That Growl - Mari Mancusi
- Stake That - Mari Mancusi
- Stone Spring - Stephen Baxter
- The People's Queen
- The New Communications Technologies, Fifth Edition...
-
▼
September
(260)
No comments:
Post a Comment