Human Cognition, Intellectualism, and Anthropomorphism: Our Brains Are Not Explaining Machines

The findings of cognitive science and neurology of the recent past question the idea of human cognition as a highly evolved, rational structure that helps to understand the world. The mind is a plastic, fallible organ shaped by selection pressures and not a computer designed to compute the causes of events. Decision heuristics, for example, confirmation bias and the availability heuristic, were adaptive and selection imperatives but cannot produce an accurate picture of the environment

 The myth of the explaining mind is erroneous because the mind does not explain for the purpose of explanation. However, our cognitive systems produce explanations in specific ways that are based on the context. This article examines such issues as the limits of human understanding, the illusions of rationality, and anthropomorphism against the background of modern knowledge in cognitive science. Various kinds of situations require different mental abilities—each of these abilities being adapted to specific forms of knowing.

The “Predictive Processing” model describes the function of the brain in creating and updating models of the environment as it creates predictions about the sensory impressions and adjusts those predictions in view of the new information. This model basically postulates that the brain is not there to tell the truth, but simply to make predictions as efficiently as possible.
 
Limitations of Human Cognition
 
Human cognition is best characterized as a set of information processing systems, each of which has been selected for by evolutionary pressures to serve particular functions. Modern research has denied the heuristic nature of the mind and the fact that human thinkers are finite and fallible creatures. Cognitive biases, automatic processes and anthropomorphism all testify that the brain is not designed to give explanations but to make sense of specific features of the world for certain purposes.