What a piece of work

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!

It is easy sometimes to get pretty impressed with ourselves. Look at our amazing society! Look at all the things we've done! We dragged ourselves out of the dirt to reach up to the stars! That is, unquestionably, impressive, but it would be an error to say that because humanity has achieved so much, humans must be beings of supreme judgement and reason. That's no more true than saying that because we can swim, we are marine animals. We achieved these things despite our biology, not because of it.

The entire space of productivity, self-improvement, cognitive science and so on is built on understanding and managing the ways that our actual brains depart from being noble in reason and infinite in faculty. Brains are not logical, not rational, and in fact I would describe them as nothing more than the simplest thing that evolved to be capable of higher-level understanding. Our genetic legacy is not a gift of god-like apprehension, but something more like the first rough draft of intelligence. All of our attempts to improve ourselves are, at root, ways to work around the limits of our minimum viable brains.

Which isn't to deny that humanity is actually pretty great. In fact, all the greater for having done so much with so little. We built towns and cities, authored innumerable works of art, walked on the moon, connected the world, fought and continue to fight valiantly against death and disease. It is likely that someday we will spread across planets and even stars, look back on the tiny people we were in this tiny place, and marvel at it. All of that, all of this, from the same brains that evolved to throw poo at rivals.

So it seems to me that a certain level of humility about our faculties is justified, and with that understanding comes two important goals: Firstly, to pave over the quirks of our evolutionary history and make the best we can of our limitations, correcting or compensating for our flaws as necessary. Secondly, to work towards a future where these workarounds are no longer necessary, where we can remake ourselves in that aspirational self-image of noble reason and infinite faculty, where we can think clearly without the fog of biases and distortions, and where we finally live up to that divine ideal.