On rationality

I bought two books during the winter break: one is Evolution of Consciousness which I just finished, and the other one is The Story of Philosophy. I did not plan to buy them when walking into the bookstore: I just bumped into them and found them quite interesting.

I think the part of the reasons I was attracted to the first book was that I have always been a big fan of evolutionary theorizing, be it biology, psychology, fitness, or sexuality. Now this is about how our mind becomes what it is now. The basic idea is that we are stuck with the Same Old Brain(SOB) as that of hunter-gatherers, our mind is adaptive, but not that rational, at least not as much as we would assume, basically it's a squadron of simpletons: many individual minds as opposed to a unified one.

The other book is about philosophy, kind of the opposite of the first book: philosophy, after all, is all about rationality. We ask the most fundamental questions about the universe, knowledge, and how people ought to live in the society.

On surface these two books might not appear related to economics, but they both touch upon on the most important( and controversial, you might say) assumption in economics: the assumed rationality of utility-maximizing individuals. As always I am kind of in-the-middle-of-the-road guy, my take on rationality is two-handed: rationality is what has made human achievements possible, but probably we have overestimated our rationality.