[MereInterest]

> If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world.

Wikipedia has an interesting list of cognitive biases [1]. Going through these, I tend to think of all of them as heuristic failures, where those shortcuts and incomplete solutions are pushed to edge cases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

[ben_w]

I’d go further and conjecture that our cognitive biases are necessary, that the “theoretically perfect” models that these biases are compared against when being called biases are actually spherical cows in a vacuum.

However, I’m not a neuroscientist, and my knowledge and use of A.I. is limited to hobby projects.

[MiracleUser]

Necessary to what end? It could be necessary to maximize survival for the species, but that doesnt make it necessary to maximize survival for an individual.

It's perfectly possible our heuristics are muddied beyond necessity in order to generate variety in action, so as to reduce risk to the unknown for the species - even though it would cause a minority of individuals to consistently make sub-optimal choices. From a speculative standpoint, it's easy to find examples of people doing things that we consider 'stupid' but it pays off because of some unlikely event occurring in coincidence.

Reality has a lot of unknowns. There is no perfect model that could account for that. It's possible being hyper-intelligent (beyond our current ability) is (or was) a disadvantage for the species

[orestarod]

Take depression and nihilism for example. Great intelligence can overcome the very drives that makes us want to keep living - which is an arbitrary cause, and an extremely tedious activity.