Szymon's Zettelkasten

Powered by 🌱Roam Garden

Philosophers since Aristotle have taught us that we are deep-thinking animals, and that we can learn by reasoning. It took a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions. The minute we forgot about this point, the “Enlightenment” came to drill it into our heads for a second time. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 202). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Our thoughts are mostly post-hoc rationalizations that compel us into believing we know more than we actually do and give a cover to our past actions.

Why? To keep going, to keep doing and not kill ourselves too much because it would make us useless evolutionarily?

Btw., getting into the bottom of psychological mechanisms is what I always do. And the bottom can be found in evolutionary biology, which I'm starting to uncover.