Sublime

his book The Folly of Fools, Trivers argues that a contradiction lies at the heart of human intelligence. Our brains are simultaneously designed to seek out information and destroy that information after we acquire it. Specifically, our minds evolved to make sense of the world not in ways that are true, but in ways that help us survive. But once

Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them.

Any theory that proposes to reduce intelligence down to a single principle—or a single “master algorithm”—is bound to be barking up the wrong tree.

One thinker whose position I believe is mischaracterized is the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. His famous “I think, therefore I am” is generally interpreted to extol rational thought, in the sense that “I think, that is I can perform logical thought, therefore I am worthwhile.” Descartes is therefore considered the architect

Evolution by natural selection is not itself a designed thing, an agent with purposes, but it acts as if it were (it occupies the role vacated by the Intelligent Designer): it is a set of processes that “find” and “track” reasons for things to be arranged one way rather than another. The chief difference between the reasons found by evolution and

Less ambitious, more accessible, Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will20 doesn’t deal with the nature of consciousness so much as with the nature of will, which Wegner thumbnails as “our mind’s way of estimating what it thinks it did.” And of course, Oliver Sacks21 was sending us memos from the edge of consciousness long before consciousness even

Just as the basic theory of genes was developed long before the discovery of DNA, so today, without knowing how ideas are stored in brains, we do know that some ideas can be passed from one person to another and affect people’s behaviour. Memes are those ideas.