About the cognitive function of “hope”: it makes evolutionary sense to become all active and bothered when a big pile of utility hinges on a single uncertain event in the near future, because that makes you frantically try to influence that event. If you don’t know how to influence it (as in the case of a lottery), oh well, evolution doesn’t care.
Evolution might care. That is, systems that expend a lot of attention on systems they can’t influence might do worse than systems that instead focus their attention on systems they can influence. But yes, either there weren’t any of the second kind of system around to compete with our ancestors, or there were and they lost out for some other reason, or there were and it turns out that it’s a bad design for our ancestral environment.
About the cognitive function of “hope”: it makes evolutionary sense to become all active and bothered when a big pile of utility hinges on a single uncertain event in the near future, because that makes you frantically try to influence that event. If you don’t know how to influence it (as in the case of a lottery), oh well, evolution doesn’t care.
Evolution might care. That is, systems that expend a lot of attention on systems they can’t influence might do worse than systems that instead focus their attention on systems they can influence. But yes, either there weren’t any of the second kind of system around to compete with our ancestors, or there were and they lost out for some other reason, or there were and it turns out that it’s a bad design for our ancestral environment.