[pattrn]

> We didn't survive as a species thanks to life guiding philosophy or in general thanks to a conscious thinking process in which we tried to predict the future.

Not sure I understand you correctly here. Choosing to build shelters from the inevitable elements, storing food for the winter months, building traps to capture animals that may walk by at some point, etc... seem like crucial, conscious, predictive behaviors that increased odds of survival. Are you talking about this type of predictive decision making, or something else?

[trabant00]

The second part of what I said is simply bad. Should have stopped at philosophy.

[pattrn]

No worries! I agree in part with your original statement, which is why I was asking for more detail. As a society I think we have too much confidence in our predictions about macro events, especially ones involving human behavior. Even the simple examples I gave likely involved many unsuccessful predictions before landing on the ones that were reproducible, so in a way we were likely poor at predicting even those events (20/20 hindsight). It's certainly an interesting topic.

In a way, we do fail pretty often at predicting, but if the gold standard is every other organism's creative predictive ability (as opposed to common instinctual behavior), we're actually quite good :).