Think on Purpose – Figuring Figuring

Brains are for making choices, so you would think that the animal with the most brains spends a lot of time thinking about what choices to make. It doesn’t seem that way to me though. It seems like a lot (most?) people spend most of their time thinking about anything but what choices to make. This is especially true of people who are in some sense tortured by their own thoughts. Some examples: What all of these types of thought have in common from my point of view is that they are not directly about figuring out what actions to take. They also seem to not be deliberate in some sense. They seem more like some sort of compulsion or habit, rather than like something someone might do on purpose in order to get the things they want. My guess is that these kinds of thought were critically important in the ancestral environment, where the narrative you told others about yourself was a matter of life and death, and where being mistaken about your relative rank could lead to some nasty confront

Brains are for making choices, so you would think that the animal with the most brains spends a lot of time thinking about what choices to make. It doesn’t seem that way to me though. It seems like a lot (most?) people spend most of their time thinking about anything but what choices to make. This is especially true of people who are in some sense tortured by their own thoughts. Some examples: What all of these types of thought have in common from my point of view is that they are not directly about figuring out what actions to take. They also seem to not be deliberate in some sense. They seem