g_pepper comments on Is there a list of cognitive illusions? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (26)
In the physical world we may call a set of wheels on a chassis, with a steering wheel, and a motor, a car. The meaning car is very tangible and useful, but cars are constructs in our minds. In reality it is organized metal, rubber, and fuel.
In the environment of the mind we build concepts like cars, but we put together properties like "store of value", "unit of account", "exchange mechanism", "divisibility", etc. and we call it money, but money doesn't exist per-se, although it is very useful to quantify it, manage it, and turn it into a commerce tool.
The same way we feel that time, free will, and randomness exist.
So, if we call some constructs "cognitive biases", others are calling these more elaborate structures "cognitive illusions".
Sure, a car is composed of other things, but that does not make the car illusory.
Similarly I see no reason to deny the reality of free will, randomness/probability, time and money.
Some structures are the sum of parts, and our designation of a meaning to the complete structure is the layer at which I think we may create things and sometimes we feel them very tangible. For example randomness is our lack of information of how thing operate so we feel them as random (or certain on the opposite side) and created probability to manage that.
Also, I think that we tend to group and categorize these parts into "information packets" (as constructs in our minds) so our brain doesn't have to compute the whole history of things each time we think about them. To think about time is much more efficient than to think about every earth spin and at which point in earth's orbit we are.
I think we are so used to time that our brain feels it exists as nearly a tangible thing.
The car is made of material that we can touch and it works, and takes us to where we want to go,but I still think the idea of the car is a construct.