Evolution and science

Note: This is the 7th and last post in a series. Start at the beginning and read "up":
http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/06/how-to-make-sense-of-it-all-theory-of.html

Daniel Kahneman, in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" describes two modes of thinking -- the fast, automatic, effortless kind, and the slow, halting kind that takes concentration and makes people tired.

It is the fast thinking that we share with other intelligent animals. The slow kind seems to be primarily if not exclusively a human invention. When we study in school, it is all about educating the slow-thinking side. One example is language. The spoken form is natural to all humans and learned by children without special instruction. It is part of fast thinking. Written language is an invention of the past few thousand years, and it does require special instruction and practice. Though to complicate matters, reading can become effortless and something we cannot turn off -- slow thinking turned to fast.

Starting in the 17th century, the slow-thinking sides of some gifted humans formed a community and launched the scientific worldview. It is all about answering "How?" instead of "Why?" Isaac Newton was a key figure. Some people scoffed at universal gravitation, thinking it ludicrous that things could affect each other without touching. His answer was that he had data and measurements on very different phenomena, and gravitation explained them all, and that trumped intuitive disbelief. He didn't know why gravity worked, but he knew how it worked. We still really have no idea why it exists.

That community of gifted humans in time grew to be today's impressive scientific establishment. Only a tiny fraction of humanity understands the intricacies of any particular point on the frontier of science, and perhaps it is only a small fraction that is gifted enough to understand it even if they decided to make it their life's goal. But the rest of us benefit from the discoveries and efforts of those tiny minorities. So we have jet planes, computers, and gene therapy.

Powerful telescopes tell us earth is a tiny speck in a sea of 250 billion other stars in our galaxy, and our galaxy is just one of 200 billion that we know of. At the other extreme, the microscopic scale, the world is just very strange, with particles popping in and out of existence and much happening based only on probabilities. Certain atomic-scale things cannot be measured without changing them.

At the intermediate scale, with regard to life, Darwin discovered and elaborated the theory of evolution by natural selection, and we know a great deal about how organisms work. Biochemistry has had a major role too.

Psychology is a case where slow thinking has come full circle to study the mind itself. It has discovered a great deal about how it works, including the instinctive, automatic fast thinking that is such a big part of who we are. A first approximation of how it differs from the clearer thinking of our slow thought processes is contained in a <list of cognitive biases>. And slow-thinking psychology has studied slow thinking itself.

However, our slow-thinking sides also have the ability to choose things that most people don't. We could choose to torture children, though thankfully hardly anyone does. We could choose to do things that are painful instead of pleasurable.

Someone could make it their life's goal to collect as many defunct microwave ovens as possible. They could make it their goal to chisel the letter "W" into as many rocks as their strength and longevity allowed. The range of what a few people will do in pursuit of their own private version of "art" is truly astonishing.

On the more positive side, we can choose to help strangers to the detriment of ourselves. We can value all humans equally without giving special preference to our nation, or our family. We can choose not to knowingly harm any animal.

Our slow-thinking side gives us the ability to defy generalizations science has made about how we will behave. But there is no objective reason anyone can give as to why those choices are preferable to the ones most people make. The closest we can come to making sense of life is to realize we are creatures shaped by evolution by natural selection.

This ends the series of posts on "the meaning of life".

(I wrote a blog post over ten years ago on how evolution explains why <happiness is transient>, which fits with this series of posts.)