If you become a student of human psychology you discover our
sub-conscious decision making ability is severely flawed by life long
conditioning, education, and natural selection responses. It is the
cornerstone of marketing and advertising.
Yes, it is, but I would not call this a flaw. It is a specification, and it does not actually limit our actions or control our behavior. Returning to the (inadequate!) analogy to computers, these things are the microcode controlling the central processor. The human-mind-as-computer can still run any program you like, and it can still emulate any other mind, but because of the way it evolved and because of the constraints placed upon it by culture, education and so on, it runs some programs awkwardly and slowly. People can add up a column of numbers, and they can fly a airplane, but we are not evolved to do these tasks, so they take a great deal of extra mental effort. We have to bend the mind to do things it was not evolved to do. You can be sure that birds fly using far fewer brain cells and we do, and of course they are much better at it. As for adding numbers, we can devise living computers made from a small network of neurons that can add far more reliably and faster than most people do, and there have been a few people born with an astounding ability to do mathematical computation, the so-called "human adding machines." No doubt they have brains that can be wired directly to perform mathematical computation, whereas the rest of us must do it symbolically, using higher logic many layers above the primitive arithmetic operations.
In other words, no matter how limited our minds may be because of education, culture, or inborn biology, we can always transcend the present-day _expression_ of these limitations. Millions of people throughout history have done this. That is the source of all progress, and all cultural change.
The key word is "transcend" -- which does not mean "escape" or "sublimate." Social evils such as war, rape, murder and McDonald's advertisements will always fascinate, attract and secretly thrill people. But that does not mean people will always indulge themselves in war or McDonald's food. It means that "Hamlet" will be a perennial bestseller for the rest of history.
- Jed
