The idea, as promoted by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, is as follows: What is the most potent use of our brain? It is precisely the ability to project conjectures into the future and play the counterfactual game—”If I punch him in the nose, then he will punch me back right away, or, worse, call his lawyer in New York.” One of the advantages of doing so is that we can let our conjectures die in our stead. Used correctly and in place of more visceral reactions, the ability to project effectively frees us from immediate, first-order natural selection—as opposed to more primitive organisms that were vulnerable to death and only grew by the improvement in the gene pool through the selection of the best. In a way, projecting allows us to cheat evolution: it now takes place in our head, as a series of projections and counterfactual scenarios.
This ability to mentally play with conjectures, even if it frees us from the laws of evolution, is itself supposed to be the product of evolution—it is as if evolution has put us on a long leash whereas other animals live on the very short leash of immediate dependence on their environment. For Dennett, our brains are “anticipation machines”; for him the human mind and consciousness are emerging properties, those properties necessary for our accelerated development.
—excerpt from The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
So that‘s why computer scientists run simulations on computers all day long!
Tags: , nassim nicholas taleb, the black swan