Why do people have it?
It's just an evolutionary ad-hoc story, but I think that in an ancient environment you would have real fights sometimes. An impulse to imagine fighting, even when you are not, is an opportunity to rehearse the techniques and learn from mistakes.
I remember reading some article that if some skill requires N hours of time, imagining the practice realistically with full attention, is almost as good as the real practice. This probably assumes that you had the real practice before, so your imagination is realistic enough. In ancient environment, your imagination of fight would be realistic enough.
An impulse to imagine fighting, even when you are not, is an opportunity to rehearse the techniques and learn from mistakes.
It is my observation that people seldom have very realistic ideas about what's involved in a fight unless they have some training or hands-on experience. Scenarios like that don't really have a lot of bearing on practical technique, so I'd be rather surprised if this emotional experience were best explained by there being a brain-module that rehearses hypothetical fights instinctively to increase people's odds. It seems like a logi...
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?