I know this question is more of a philosophical one rather than strictly scientific, but I want your opinion anyways.
How did we become rational animals? Which process did happen in our brains/mind/society that allowed us to reason?
Do you guys think there is there an ultimate purpose for human reason?
How did we become rational animals? Which process did happen in our brains/mind/society that allowed us to reason?
>evolution, synaptic pathways, this neurology stuff
>Do you guys think there is there an ultimate purpose for human reason?
surviving and spreading your genes
>evolution, synaptic pathways, this neurology stuff
I know that, but I'd like to know if there are well established scientific theories about how exactly did this happen or if there's still a lot of uncertainty about it.
>surviving and spreading your genes
In which way?
I can imagine a lot of other more useful traits of spreading your genes instead of becoming a fucking immaterial ghost.
>more useful ways of spreading
Fixed.
IMO, humans lived in groups, so they needed to relay their decision to others, even when the others had no reason to trust them. So they learned (evolutionary, of course) to explain themselves, which is what we now call "rationality". I. e. a non-sentient being may act right (whatever "right" might mean), but a sentient one will also be able to explain why it thinks it is right.
Common error. There cannot be a purpose in life. No teleology in biology. Reproduction appears to be a purpose but it is really just consequential for the factors required for our own existence. Natural selection is just the mechanics of replication. Newtons laws and such.
I disagree because the evolution of intelligence and there for rationality has a far longer history than us explaining things to eachother.
You are right about the group thing though. Social structure is a pressure. Social animals tend to overall be more intelligent. The ability to infer someones inner life from the outside world is a complex ability.
Any evidence? Of course, it depends of your definition of intelligence, but still.
Sure can just look at the development and complexity of the brain over millions of years, increasing size and connections of neocortex and specifically the development of the prefrontal areas and then can compare cognitive abilities of different animals today. You can see the rudiments of rationality in the ability for animals to do things like gambling tasks, delay discounting, set-shifting/ reversal learning and also things like folk physics which developmental evolutionary psychologists often compare between children and other animals. Numerical ability you could even say is a rudiment of it and you can see that in less intelligent animals.
>How did we become rational animals? Which process did happen in our brains/mind/society that allowed us to reason?
the central nervous system evolved by building structures atop one another. the brain stem for example is the lowest of them all and in it there are (among other things) bulbar reflexes like breathing, coughing, barfing and stuff like that, in other words, super important stuff even for lizards and fish and whatnot - so its definitely evolutionarily speaking very old.
all the other parts of the brain just built themselves upon the lower structures, with the final part being the "rational animal" part - the prefrontal cortex; the reason why we have a bulging forehead compared to every other animal (compare you forehead to the forehead of our ancestors and you can see the trend of a growing forehead)
also this is a fairly scientific question based on the formulation
>Do you guys think there is there an ultimate purpose for human reason?
"purpose" is a very human ("rational") term, so there isnt really any scientific consensus on that.
i doubt there will ever be.
What you say, animals developed increasingly more complex behaviour through evolution. But it isn't specially behaviour which evolves. "Primitive" liveforms (think amoeba) cannot develop any intelligence simply because they lacks complexity, they just haven't got enough wires to count up to three. The question is, what is so special about human compared to other "complex" animals. I. e. a bear has enough complexity, yet we cannot say it is intelligent in a sense a human is. It can do smart and complex things, even figure out something it didn't knew before, but it isn't especially good on passing knowledge.
Humans are incredibally intelligent but i think people are mistaken in thinking that the difference is qualitative. What makes us special is along the same lines that makes a primate special compared to a rat and a rat special compared to say a lizard. I'd agree language is powerful and astounding but im not sure it needs special different circuitry (many lower animals can use rudimental language) and theres many other things we are better than animals at apart from language.
when neil tyson showed us how insignificant we are :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDd
If millions of years of evolution have shaped us to be the best we can be at spreading our genes, how is that not the purpose of life? It is the only reason we are here, literally.
It's our attraction to patterns that makes us "intelligent." It's the reason why music and dancing is part of every culture.
The problem is that people attribute consciousness to intelligence and thereby say that amoebas are not "intelligent." Intelligence is not consciousnesses and the population of Amoeba's are intelligent for they are capable of finding patterns in an environment and adapt accordingly.
Reasoning is also about patterns. For example you find the pattern that Dave goes fishing on Saturdays from observing Dave. It is Saturday so you predict Dave is fishing, although this might not necessarily be true. It's a prediction.
Evolution is not optimal and you are begging the question by saying "it shaped us to". Purpose is subjective interpretation. Just because we do something doesnt make it a purpose. We dont live to reproduce, just if we dont, we dont exist which happens all the time in extinction. Reproductkon is just incidental to our exustence, its not a guiding theme. Youll see the subjectivity in that we dont apply purpose to inanimate things even if they have regularities and systematic aspects like living systems.
Guiding theme is bad way of saying it. A theme isnt necessarily a purpose. The guy up there is right. Purpose is a human construct and i remember seeing in a biologust book that theres no purpose in biology and that we talk about it as if it has purpose because it is the easiest way to describe it. Remember natural selection is directionless. Completely incidental.
What you describe isnt unique to humans qualitatively.
Sorry forget that last one. Guess depends on definitions.
I want to give you a meme answer because I think there might be a tiny bit of sense to it: Drugs. Psychedelic drugs. All that Terence Mckenna stuff.
Otherwise, looking at the development of the brain, is probably mostly correct.
Why drugs?