Tim Tyler wrote:

> melvin  wrote or quoted:
> 
> [Door/Goat/Car puzzle]
> 
> 
>>Some psychologists have studied in detail what leads people to the
>>right or wrong conclusion and it would be interesting if one could do
>>a study to tie in evolutionary pressures in intelligence to shed light
>>on why the approaches to this problem are so divergent or if certain
>>types of thinking though wrong still have an evolutionary benifit
>>which outweighs the negative effects of incorrect reasoning.
> 
> 
> The benefit is likely to be that resources spent on getting esoteric
> mental apparatus to work well on problems they have not been well trained
> on - and which ancestors rarely encountered - is better spent elsewhere.

Human intelligence is mostly ANAlogical in a nature.  Reasoning
which, according to Hume, is simply comparing, is a development
from conditioning.  Although we often focus on the logical
sequential aspects of both conditioning and reasoning, simply
because they enable us to cognize the order in the manner in
which we cognize order, the heart of the process is ANAlogical
in which:

    conditioning = the cognition of OBVIOUS similarity and
                   difference
                   example:  this A + B sequence is similar
                             to one previously observed

and

    reasoning = the cognition of ABSTRUSE similarity and
                difference
                example:  electricity is like water flowing
                          in a pipe.

and with the dividing line between conditioning and reasoning as
indistinct as the blurriness in the concept of similarity itself.

Notice this way of viewing matters allows you a nice evolutionary
understanding of how reasoning evolved from conditioning.  Its
also compatible with Hume's claim that 'All reasoning is nothing
but comparing' and his claim that there are only three types of
association, RESEMBLENCE, contiguity, and cause and effect.

In man, cause and effect does most of the heavy lifting in
explanatory hypothesese, but causal examplanations are themselves
the result of postulating an abstruse similarity, the postulated
similarity between our impression of the minds affectations and
effectations (causes) and the primitive ancestors of modern
scientific explanations, e.g.., the volcanic eruption is "caused"
by a spatially non-extended self-conscious agent (gods, spirits,
etc.).  So even cause and effect explanations are largely based on
RESEMBLENCE to other features.  In short, reasoning is ANAlogical
at its very core:


     One should not think of analogy-making as a special
     variety of reasoning (as in the dull and uninspiring
     phrase "analogical reasoning and problems solving,"
     a long-standing cliche in the cognitive science world),
     for that is to do analogy a terrible disservice.  Afer
     all, reasoninng and problem-solving have (at least I
     dearly hope!) been at long last recognized as lying
     far indeed from the core of human thought.  If analogy
     were merely a special variety of something that in
     itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would
     be but an itty bitty blip in the broad blue sky of
     cognition.  To me, however, analogy is anything but
     a bitty blip -- rather, ITS THE VERY BLUE THAT FILLS
     THE WHOLE SKY OF COGNITION -- ANALOGY IS EVERYTHING...
     (Douglas Hofstadter) [emphasis mind].


One of the problems that has plagued much of game theory, normative
decision theory etc, is the assumption that reasoning is mostly
a matter of logic.  The result is a whole lot of confusion, such
as the 1981 Cohen symposium (Behavioral and Brain Sciences) on
rationality entitled, 'Can Human Irrationality Be Experimentally
Demonstrated?'.  The author supposes that fellow humans set the
standard for what qualifies as rational, with some thirty or
fourty commentators going balistic about Cohen's suggestion that
the discovery of lots of logical fallacies in human reasoning
can not tell us about human irrationality.

If reasoning is predominently ANAlogical, Cohen was right, but
for reasons he didn't fully understand at the time, among them
the failure to appreciate the distinction between logic and
rationality.  Unlike logic, rationality entails AN OPEN-ENDED
QUANTITATIVE COMPONENT and, as such, can only be found in the
concrete world in RELATIVE terms.  If so, then of course
you can't demonstrate human irrationality by pointing to logical
deficiencies.  That's because all rationality ascriptions are
implicitly referencing the norm.  IOW, when we say X is
rational or irrational, what we really mean is that X falls
above or below the norm.  But human beings are just not going
to encumber themselves with relativistic language in every day
speech.

More recently we have the Coleman symposium on rationality
(Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2003).  Twenty three years
later they are making the exact same mistake (I tried to
get a few in the earlier Cohen symposium to listen to me
but, obviously, to no avail  :)  ), although at least
in this more recent symposium the mistake doesn't show up until
the first sentence, "Is rational social interaction possible?"

Once it is understood that rationality NEVER appears in nature
in any but a relative sense of the term, you realize that such
a question constitutes an exercise in futility in that, it
really amounts to asking one's self 'Is the relative amount
of rationality normaly present in social interaction possible?"
Its just that none of these guys wants to give up on the belief
that you can reduce rationality to logic, i.e., the belief that
rational creatures are deterministic (follow logical rules)
rather than creatures that COGNIZE rules and, with it, the
capacity TO TRANSCEND rules when and if it is deemed
"rational", (e.g., the rule maximize your own self-interest
favored by mother nature) in spite of the fact
that Godel has already demonstrated that it can't be
done.


PR
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