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Avoiding My Own Traps
Reflections on psychological dilemmas
The human mind is astonishingly complex. We’re still fine-tuning our understanding of the mechanics of how it works and why we do the things we do. Trying to understand human behavior has been an area of fascination for people throughout history and is the core question at the heart of the social sciences.
Obviously, psychology and sociology directly study the origins of human behavior, but many other fields of study boil down to essentially the same thing. Economics is basically psychology applied to the distribution of resources. Political science is psychology applied to government and international relations. I tend to think of history as forensic psychology in reconstructing why people from the past reacted to their circumstances in the way they did.
Thinking Meat
When considering the problems of understanding human behavior I often think of the short story by Terry Bisson called “They’re Made Out of Meat.” In this story, some highly advanced aliens discover Earth and are astonished to discover the human creatures on this planet think with meat. It’s a pretty entertaining story, but framing humans as thinking meat creatures is useful in considering the complexity of human behavior. It’s a wonder we work at all. The fact the meat between our ears has…
