The designer had a specific design goal : “thou shalt replicate adequately well under the following environmental conditions”...
Given the complex, intricate mechanisms that humans seem to have that allow for this, the “designer” did a pretty good job.
Cognitive biases boost replication under the environmental conditions they were meant for, and they save on the brainpower required.
So yes, I agree with you. If the human brain system were an engineered product, it clearly meets all of the system requirements the client (mother nature) asked for. It clearly passes the testing. The fact that it internally takes a lot of shortcuts and isn’t capable of optimal performance in some alien environment (cities, virtual spaces, tribes larger than a few hundred people) doesn’t make it a bad solution.
Another key factor you need to understand in order to appreciate nature is the constraints it is operating under. We can imagine a self-replicating system that has intelligence of comparable complexity and flexibility to humans that makes decisions that optimal to a few decimal places. But does such a system exist inside the design space accessible to Earth biology? Probably not.
The simple reason for this is 3 billion years of version lock in. All life on earth uses a particular code-space, where every possible codon in DNA maps to a specific amino acid. With 3 bases per codon, there’s 4^3 possibilities, and all of them map to an existing amino acid. In order for a new amino acid to be added to the code base, existing codons would have to be repurposed, or an organism’s entire architecture would need to be extended to a 4 (or more) codon base system.
We can easily design a state machine that translates XXX → _XXX, remapping an organisms code to a new coding scheme. However, such a machine would be incredibly complicated at the biological level—it would be a huge complex of proteins and various RNA tools, and it would only be needed once in a particular organism’s history. Evolution is under no forces to evolve such a machine, and the probability of it occurring by chance is just too small.
To summarize, everything that can ever be designed by evolution has to be made of amino acids from a particular set, or created as a derivative product by machinery made of these amino acids.
An organism without cognitive biases would probably need a much more powerful brain. Nature cannot build such a brain with the parts available.
The designer had a specific design goal : “thou shalt replicate adequately well under the following environmental conditions”...
Given the complex, intricate mechanisms that humans seem to have that allow for this, the “designer” did a pretty good job.
Cognitive biases boost replication under the environmental conditions they were meant for, and they save on the brainpower required.
So yes, I agree with you. If the human brain system were an engineered product, it clearly meets all of the system requirements the client (mother nature) asked for. It clearly passes the testing. The fact that it internally takes a lot of shortcuts and isn’t capable of optimal performance in some alien environment (cities, virtual spaces, tribes larger than a few hundred people) doesn’t make it a bad solution.
Another key factor you need to understand in order to appreciate nature is the constraints it is operating under. We can imagine a self-replicating system that has intelligence of comparable complexity and flexibility to humans that makes decisions that optimal to a few decimal places. But does such a system exist inside the design space accessible to Earth biology? Probably not.
The simple reason for this is 3 billion years of version lock in. All life on earth uses a particular code-space, where every possible codon in DNA maps to a specific amino acid. With 3 bases per codon, there’s 4^3 possibilities, and all of them map to an existing amino acid. In order for a new amino acid to be added to the code base, existing codons would have to be repurposed, or an organism’s entire architecture would need to be extended to a 4 (or more) codon base system.
We can easily design a state machine that translates XXX → _XXX, remapping an organisms code to a new coding scheme. However, such a machine would be incredibly complicated at the biological level—it would be a huge complex of proteins and various RNA tools, and it would only be needed once in a particular organism’s history. Evolution is under no forces to evolve such a machine, and the probability of it occurring by chance is just too small.
To summarize, everything that can ever be designed by evolution has to be made of amino acids from a particular set, or created as a derivative product by machinery made of these amino acids.
An organism without cognitive biases would probably need a much more powerful brain. Nature cannot build such a brain with the parts available.