I don't think that the human mind evolved this to protect us from the overload of information. Perception definitely does protect us from the overload of stimuli, but that's different.
We evolved much of our physiology in conditions where we were not exposed to much information at all. Written history is less than a blink of an eye in our species's history. I think that we're just not equipped to understand many forms of information, many of us can't even understand large magnitudes of numbers. We say the world has more than 7 billion people. Do we really have a sense of how many that is? Not really, it's just a number. Without using equipments can we even determine how fast something is moving? You probably won't even trust the estimate you come up with. My point is, we're not equipped to differentiate perception from reality without extra help, which is why science is an actual field you need to be trained in, and much of it involves how to minimize human error. If this is not done, we won't get far trying to learn about our environment, because we'll make too many mistakes. And that's part of the problem, because if people aren't exposed to science/reality, their perceived reality may very well fit perfectly into their worldview. Another thing about too much information, we don't understand numbers like I said, that's why we need to learn statistics and learn what they actually mean.
We evolved much of our physiology in conditions where we were not exposed to much information at all. Written history is less than a blink of an eye in our species's history. I think that we're just not equipped to understand many forms of information, many of us can't even understand large magnitudes of numbers. We say the world has more than 7 billion people. Do we really have a sense of how many that is? Not really, it's just a number. Without using equipments can we even determine how fast something is moving? You probably won't even trust the estimate you come up with. My point is, we're not equipped to differentiate perception from reality without extra help, which is why science is an actual field you need to be trained in, and much of it involves how to minimize human error. If this is not done, we won't get far trying to learn about our environment, because we'll make too many mistakes. And that's part of the problem, because if people aren't exposed to science/reality, their perceived reality may very well fit perfectly into their worldview. Another thing about too much information, we don't understand numbers like I said, that's why we need to learn statistics and learn what they actually mean.
