Why We Don't Need Perfect Understanding to Make Good Decisions

 

I have written previously about "bounded rationality," a behavioral economics concept that says people's decision-making is not as logical as they might believe. I have also written about various ways that we can improve our decisions, whether that's through the scientific method, the legal process, or peer review. Some of these strategies rely just as much on the Intuitive Mind as on the Narrative Mind, and other strategies like Gary Klein's Naturalistic Decision Making or the actions triggered by situational awareness are even more Intuitive. This week, I'd like to examine the idea that even the more rational strategies don't need to be strictly true in order to help us succeed.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant described a difference between phenomena, which are the things we experience, and noumena, which is the underlying reality that generates phenomena. Unfortunately, we have no way to connect with that underlying reality. Everything we might see, touch, evaluate, or scientifically measure is still part of our experience of the world -- in other words, just another example of phenomena. Noumena remain forever mysterious. This position is called transcendental idealism, because it doesn't deny that there really is a world around us; it just insists that anything we see or believe about that world is mediated through our ideas about it.

Now, it's probably true that the world around us is made up of physical "stuff" that we can see and touch. At some level, of course, physics tells us that even that "stuff" is really made up of particles and electromagnetic fields, with objects' mass being just the interaction between fundamental particles and a field produced by the Higgs boson. But Kant's view means that it's equally possible that our standard materialist understanding is wrong. Some alternatives might be that we are living in a computer simulation (as proposed by David Chalmers), or that reality is a mathematical model corresponding to the tones sung by immaterial angels (a non-physical "Turing machine" that could simulate events just as well as a computer does, proposed by Eric Schwitzgebel). Reality, in other words, has some underlying structure that produces the things that we believe we experience. The nature of that reality, though, could be many different things.

Alvin Plantinga and CS Lewis both argued that rational thinking should not be trusted if it evolved through random processes, and turned that argument around as a proof for the existence of God. On the other hand, Paul Churchland argues that our Narrative Minds are evolutionarily selected on the basis of what helps us to survive; Daniel Dennett extended that argument to suggest that because a true representation of reality is likely to be more adaptive than a false one, evolution is actually selecting for truth. I don't think that either of these arguments is highly convincing: Churchland's intermediate position about adaptive functioning is the simplest explanation for why logic generally produces good results. 

The Narrative Mind doesn't need to be accurate all the time in order to still be useful to us in predicting events. In particular, it isn't necessary for the Narrative Mind to have any access to Kant's level of noumena, only to predict relationships between events. We also have access to the Intuitive Mind, which doesn't even pretend to be accurate, but it is still often useful in producing insights that the Narrative Mind cannot.

The true nature of the world may always remain unknowable to us. We can still, however, be very successful in navigating it with the help of our two complementary ways of understanding.