What makes people irrational thinkers?

[The Architect Of Fate]

I want to point out one other thing Hart says close to the beginning of his diatribe (page 17-18):

"If, moreover, naturalism is correct (how-
ever implausible that is), and if consciousness is then an essentially
material phenomenon, then there is no reason to believe that our
minds, having evolved purely through natural selection, could pos-
sibly be capable of knowing what is or is not true about reality as
a whole. Our brains may necessarily have equipped us to recog-
nize certain sorts of physical objects around us and enabled us to
react to them; but, beyond that, we can assume only that nature
will have selected just those behaviors in us most conducive to
our survival, along with whatever structures of thought and belief
might be essentially or accidentally associated with them, and there
is no reason to suppose that such structures—even those that pro-
vide us with our notions of what constitutes a sound rational ar-
gument—have access to any abstract “truth” about the totality of
things. This yields the delightful paradox that, if naturalism is true
as a picture of reality, it is necessarily false as a philosophical pre-
cept; for no one’s belief in the truth of naturalism could corre-
spond to reality except through a shocking coincidence (or, better,
a miracle)."

Well, he is quite correct that evolution has not built our brains to find the truth of the world. It has built our brains for survival.
This, of course, ties into the whole thread: what makes people irrational? The answer is that we have not evolved to be rational,
we have evolved to survive.

And the history of our species shows that we *don't* easily see how the world around us actually is.

It has taken a LOT of hard work, a LOT of skepticism about 'obviously true' concepts, and a LOT of testing to be sure we are
not fooling ourselves. We do NOT naturally see or experience a great deal about the world: we do not see radio waves,infrared,
ultraviolet. We do not hear ultrasound or infrasound. We do not detect radioactivity. We cannot see things that are too small.
We don't see with much precision or accuracy. We are subject to many types of illusions, from optical, to auditory, to tactile,
all of which distort our perception of reality.

And, most importantly for this discourse, we tend to see intention where there is none. From seeing faces in toast, to claiming
our computers are 'acting up', to naming our cars, we have a strong evolutionary tendency to misinterpret our environment
in ways that promoted survival at one time, but do not serve any good purpose now.

Furthermore, even our patterns of thought don't necessarily correspond to reality. Simple things like basic logic are hard for
most people, even those who are highly educated and trained. There is a perception that the rules of thought were elucidated
by Aristotle and have been fixed since then. of course, that is very far from the truth. There have been HUGE advances in logic
over the last couple of centuries with the rise of formal logic. The deficiencies of our 'ways of thought' have been revealed and
analyzed in ways that the ancient Greeks could not have imagined.

So, yes, it would be a miracle if our first attempts to understand the world around us actually were correct. And, of course, they
were not. From bad metaphysics to not testing our ideas, to making assumptions that were wrong, we have made many mistakes
along the road to even our present level of understanding.

And we do NOT expect that we have the actual truth even now. We get better and better *approximations* that serve to explain
and organize our perceptions. But new information and new techniques usually open up new aspects to investigate. This is why
ALL hypotheses are held tentatively and *tested* in as many different ways as possible, attempting to show when and how they
are *wrong*.

TL;DR: Hart completely misunderstands physicalism and the way we go about learning about the world around us.

---

Another aspect that goes right to Hart's basic search: the question of whether 'existence' can be 'explained' at all.

So, what does it mean for one collection of concepts to 'explain' another?

Clearly, it means that we can deduce the main properties of the things 'explained' from the properties of the 'explainers'. The explanation is the deduction itself.

So, what could *possibly* constitute an 'explanation for existence'?

it would have to be a collection of things from which we can deduce the properties of all of existence.

But those 'explainers' either exist, in which case they don't explain their own existence, and thereby fail to explain existence.

OR, those 'explainers' do not exist and thereby cannot be an explanation for *anything*.

Ultimately, what that means is that 'existence' cannot be explained: it is a raw fact that cannot be deduced from more basic facts.

And, I want to point out that Hart *never* actually explains existence. He claims that there is a simple entity that 'necessarily exists'
Ultimately, all this means is that its existence is not explained.

In other words, Hart fails in his basic quest. Furthermore, he *must* fail in that quest.

At that point, we realize that there *must* be things that exist that have no deeper explanations: raw facts that cannot be deduced from
more basic principles OR there are 'explanatory loops' OR there is an infinite regress of explanations. Usually, we discount the last two possibilities as not giving 'actual explanations' (although we might want to reconsider these options).

And, at no point does Hart show why 'the physical world' cannot be that basic unexplained explainer.

So he claims, but fails to prove that physicalism cannot do the utmost of what is possible toward his goal.

It is because we know our minds are not good at determining reality we need disciplines like science. If our minds were excellent at intuitively finding truth science would be worthless.