Heuristic Beings: Human Perception and Cognition
“Beyond Intuition: Essays on Information, Cognition, and AI” is a collection of short essays where I explore intuitions linking epistemology, information theory, mathematics, computability, and artificial intelligence. While these essays may not follow a rigorous structure or a strict chain of thought, I believe the core ideas will still resonate. Presenting them as rough drafts allows for a more organic development of my thoughts, which I plan to refine and organize more coherently in the future.
Over the past few years, I’ve been cultivating insights into the relationship between the nature of information and computational models. From these insights, I argue that modern machine learning models can surpass human capabilities by leveraging patterns beyond our intuitive grasp. This suggests that as models continue to grow, mechanistic interpretability may become obsolete, neurosymbolic systems might not outperform pure inscrutable matrices in the long run, and the capabilities of AI could vastly exceed those of humans.
This series is heavily philosophical, and I have outlined several parts (which may evolve over time):
- Heuristic Beings: Human Perception and Cognition
- Tools for Developing Monkey-Brain Heuristics
- Limits of Human Intuition
- Alien Intuitions
- Machine Learning as Compression Algorithms
- Consequences of Heuristics Beyond Human Intuition
I am not an expert in these fields and may discuss topics without using precise philosophical terminology. I do not claim originality for these ideas and welcome any discussion or feedback at gculp@mit.edu.
This first essay focuses on human cognition and perception, examining how and why these systems are far from perfect.
01 The Illusion of Human Rationality
01.01 Traditional Views of Rationality
Western philosophy has long portrayed humans as rational agents capable of perceiving reality as it truly is. The idea is that through logical reasoning and perfect information, we can gain deeper insights into a true, Platonic reality. Traditional economics mirrors this assumption by treating individuals as agents who carefully weigh costs and benefits, ultimately choosing the option that maximizes their utility with complete self-control.
While these assumptions are useful for modeling certain behaviors — and economists are aware they don’t perfectly reflect real-world decision-making — many people remain unaware of their own biases. It’s common to hear claims about someone being “unbiased,” such as a judge, implying that true objectivity is achievable. However, this overlooks the inherent biases and limitations in human perception and cognition. While most understand that “unbiased” in the case of a judge means “holding no bias that would sway the case unfairly,” the language we use indicates how pervasive the idea of “perceiving reality as it is” remains and how it can subtly influence us.
01.02 Recognizing Human Biases
In contrast to the Enlightenment-era view of humans as purely rational agents, modern fields like behavioral economics and psychology have highlighted the common mistakes we make in perceiving reality — from cognitive biases to optical illusions. These disciplines acknowledge that our perceptions are often distorted, but they tend to treat these distortions as exceptions to an otherwise accurate view of reality.
By labeling these errors as mere “distortions,” we imply that there are times when we perceive reality exactly as it is. In other words, when biases and illusions aren’t at play, we assume we are accurately observing the world. This perspective suggests that we are rational beings with occasional biases — that even though we’re “drawing the map,” we can still “see the territory.” However, this overlooks the possibility that our entire perception is filtered through inherent biases, not just in isolated instances but as a fundamental aspect of how we experience the world. We have never seen the territory, only maps.
02 Evolutionary Origins of Heuristics
Evolutionary psychology explains why we have certain biases, viewing them as useful heuristics that help us find approximate solutions to survival and fitness problems more quickly and with less energy expenditure. These biases emerge through the imperfect and random process of genetic mutations.
If a heuristic is too cognitively demanding, it can slow decision-making or consume excessive energy, jeopardizing the animal’s survival. For context, humans use about 25% of their total energy on brain function — a higher proportion than most other animals (though species with higher brain-to-body ratios may consume similar proportions). Conversely, overly simplistic heuristics may lead to suboptimal decisions, also threatening survival. Therefore, while humans are intelligent, evolution doesn’t always favor greater intelligence. Far from evolution monotonically increasing intelligence, some species alive today may be less intelligent than their ancestors for their ability to make faster decisions and be more energy efficient.
Thus, human thought and perception function as heuristics approximating an extremely complex — perhaps impossible — perfect solution for survival and fitness. Such a perfect solution couldn’t be embodied by any animal or human. For example, making the optimal choice about whether to eat an apple might require contemplating decades into the future: assessing its nutritional value, the possibility of it being poisoned, social ramifications of accepting or declining it, whether it was stolen from another tribe member, the opportunity cost of eating it versus other activities, and so on.
In the following sections, I will explore how evolutionarily shaped heuristics operate at every level of human experience, categorized into perception, cognition, and goals.
03 Heuristics in Human Perception
03.01 Limitations of Sensory Perception
It’s clear that we do not perceive all aspects of reality. Even when we examine an apple from various angles or cut it open, we cannot claim to observe its full reality.
Consider the physical properties beyond our sensory capabilities. We cannot perceive ultraviolet light or polarization like bees, detect infrared radiation like snakes, or experience the rich color spectrum visible to mantis shrimps. We’re unable to sense electric fields like sharks, ultrasonic frequencies like bats, vibrational patterns like spiders, or possess the enhanced sense of smell that dogs do.
Some might think, “So what?” However, our limited perception is significant. Much of human endeavor is dedicated to extending our sensory boundaries. We’ve developed telescopes, microscopes, infrared and ultraviolet cameras, seismographs, radiation detectors, neutrino observatories, mass spectrometers, DNA sequencers, weather monitoring stations, and more. These tools expand our perception, enabling more informed decisions and fueling scientific advancement. There is tremendous value in what we cannot directly perceive.
Imagine if humans inherently possessed all these perceptual abilities without cognitive or energy costs; our history would be radically different. People could observe planets without telescopes, interpret complex social networks through enhanced smell, hear conversations from miles away, avoid burns by seeing infrared radiation, predict earthquakes through heightened sensitivity, anticipate weather changes, detect health issues in others, and perceive microorganisms on every surface. This superhuman perception would lead to superhuman decision-making capabilities, illustrating why we invest so much effort into developing technology that enhances our “pseudo-perception.”
Even though we can access these properties through technological tools, it’s not the same as natively possessing these senses and the intuitions that come with lifelong use. There are several reasons for this:
- Sensory Synergy: Our senses often work together to create a more comprehensive understanding of our environment. For example, sight and hearing combine to help us perceive spatial geometry. The McGurk effect demonstrates how visual cues from lip movements influence our auditory perception of speech. Similar synergistic intuitions may exist between perceptions we are unfamiliar with.
- Intuitive Understanding: Living with a sense throughout one’s life fosters deep intuitions. Someone with a keen sense of smell from birth might detect subtle environmental relationships that others cannot.
- Limited Integration: When we use tools to perceive new types of information, we typically map that data onto our existing senses. We can’t directly perceive ultraviolet light alongside the visible spectrum; instead, we translate this information into forms we can understand, like visual representations on a monitor. This process compresses higher-dimensional data into lower-dimensional formats that fit within our sensory limitations.
While evolution is unlikely to endow animals with all these advanced senses due to energy costs and genetic constraints, some additional senses are possible, as indicated by species close to us with particular abilities — like dogs and bears with enhanced smell.
We readily acknowledge the disadvantages of being blind, colorblind, or deaf. If we were born with other superhuman senses, we might recognize the vast dimensionality of reality and mourn their loss if taken away. The absence of certain senses in humans could stem from minimal evolutionary benefits relative to energy costs or the lack of feasible genetic pathways for incremental development.
Returning to the example of the apple: it contains countless dimensions of information, of which we perceive only a tiny fraction. Claiming to fully perceive the apple is an overstatement — it’s akin to saying that viewing a single grayscale pixel represents the entire apple. Similar to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, someone who has only ever seen the apple as a grayscale pixel wouldn’t realize the depth of information they’re missing and might underestimate the power of perception.
Note: This analogy is somewhat exaggerated. I believe information tends to have diminishing returns; the initial bits are often the most significant in the majority of tasks.
Our sensory experiences act as a lossy compression of reality, not just metaphorically but functionally. Like data compression algorithms, our senses reduce the vast, complex data of the environment into a simplified, essential form, discarding non-critical information to optimize for survival and efficiency. This evolutionary adaptation allows us to process necessary information without being overwhelmed, but it also means we perceive only a fraction of the universe’s full physical properties.
03.02 Perceiving the Non-Physical
Beyond the physical properties of the apple that we perceive, there are numerous non-physical, abstract properties that are equally real and often more significant in our decision-making. These properties are not directly observed but are constructed through our understanding, experiences, and the meanings we assign within our social and cultural contexts.
For example, finding an ingot of gold carries implications far beyond its physical characteristics like weight or color. Its societal and economic value — worth in trade, rarity, desirability — is often more impactful than any physical property. Even monkeys have demonstrated an understanding of basic trade concepts, exchanging tokens for treats, indicating an ability to grasp value beyond the immediate physical object.
In the case of the apple, these non-physical properties might include:
- Temporal Properties: How long will it remain fresh before it rots? Was it harvested recently or stored for months?
- Provenance: Where did it come from? Was it locally grown or imported? Is it organic or conventionally farmed?
- Social Properties: What is its market value? Is it a rare variety prized by gourmet chefs? Does it carry cultural or symbolic meanings?
- Utility Properties: Can it be used for cooking, juicing, or as a medicinal ingredient? Does it have particularly valuable nutritional benefits?
- Symbolic Properties: Does it represent knowledge, temptation, or health (e.g., “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”) in various cultural narratives?
- Economic Properties: How does its price compare to other fruits? Is it subject to tariffs or subsidies that affect its cost?
These non-physical properties are primarily about understanding the more abstract relationships the apple has with things other than itself.
It’s crucial to note that these non-physical properties are real to us, sometimes even more significant than the physical elements and can grab our attention before their physical properties do. When handed a wad of cash, we don’t think “a flat piece of green paper”; we think “money! value!”.
As Yuval Noah Harari discusses extensively in his book Sapiens, we have abstract narratives that shape our perceptions and actions: Religion, Government, Law, Business, etc. These abstract narratives are so powerful that people are willing to fight and die for them.
These concepts are real because we have intuitions for them, just as we have intuitions derived from our senses for the physical world. The intuition “If I drop this ball, it will bounce and make a sound” is as real to us as “If I speed in front of this police officer, I will get a ticket.” This is fascinating because these are dramatically different problems — the latter is more abstract, involving intuitions about law, society, economic value, theory of mind, and more. Yet both are automatic, System 1 processes requiring no deep consideration.
03.03 Computational Complexity and Evolutionary Priorities
In the previous example, common belief suggests that understanding the causal relationship with the police officer (“If I speed in front of this police officer, I will get a ticket”) is more difficult than understanding the causal relationship with the ball (“If I drop this ball, it will bounce and make a sound”). This is evidenced by the fact that babies and animals have intuitions for the latter but not the former.
However, I argue that it’s not immediately obvious which is more computationally complex. Rather, it’s clear which intuitions are more evolutionarily advantageous to develop first. If a species evolved intuitions for laws and social relationships but lacked understanding of physical dangers like falling off a cliff, it would likely not survive. Evolution favors developing intuitions around basic physics over abstract concepts like law because they are critical for immediate survival.
Therefore, it’s conceivable that intuitions about laws and economics could be computationally simpler than those about basic physics. The discrepancy between “what tasks evolution favors giving intuitions toward” and “what tasks are computationally simple” is well-known in computer science — Moravec’s paradox exemplifies this:
“It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”
Intuitions are extremely powerful, and humans spend immense resources and time developing intuitions they aren’t born with through education. These learned intuitions (ex: math or economics) may involve computational problems that are actually easier than the intuitions we have from birth.
In the next essay, I will describe how we use our hardwired intuitions to build new ones.
In a later essay, I will also describe alien intuitions — intuitions that humans are not born with and are unable to develop.
03.04 The Interplay of Perception and Cognition
Contrary to the traditional view that humans first perceive the world objectively and then process it cognitively, evidence suggests that cognition actively shapes our perceptions.
Drugs or mental illnesses can dramatically alter our perceptions, even though the sensory input — the sounds entering our ears, the images reaching our eyes, the chemicals detected by our noses — remains the same. Children’s imaginations can cause them to see figures in the dark that aren’t there, and emotional states can affect how we perceive others’ facial expressions.
A notable example is the viral “black and blue vs. white and gold dress” optical illusion from the early 2010s, where people’s assumptions about lighting conditions influenced the colors they perceived. Numerous optical illusions demonstrate that we can perceive shapes, faces, colors, movements, and more that do not exist in reality.
The line between what we perceive and what we think is very thin if it exists at all.
04 Heuristics in Human Cognition
Our cognition is shaped by numerous cognitive biases — mental shortcuts like the availability heuristic, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and self-assessment biases. These evolved heuristics enable us to process information efficiently, make quick decisions in complex environments, and foster social cohesion, enhancing survival. Since these topics are fairly well known, I will not go into detail about them here.
05 Heuristics in Goal Formation
Shard Theory explores how, in developing heuristics for survival and fitness, humans form alternative goals that are distinct from evolutionary objectives but are easier to make decisions about. Instead of consciously striving to fulfill what evolution “wants,” people focus on immediate desires like consuming calorie-rich food, maintaining strong social bonds, seeking novelty, and sex.
During our evolutionary history, these immediate goals closely approximated evolutionary fitness, effectively serving as “shards” of value that guided evolutionary beneficial behaviors. However, these rewarding activities can sometimes become counterproductive — for instance, indulging in junk food can lead to health issues, deviating from the original evolutionary advantage of seeking high-calorie nourishment.
06 Embracing Humans as Heuristic Beings
06.01 Reframing Human Rationality
Given all this, it may be more accurate to redefine humans not as “rational beings with heuristics” but as “heuristic beings.” We are not inherently rational creatures occasionally influenced by biases; rather, our entire perception and cognition are fundamentally shaped by these heuristics. Everything we experience is filtered through deeply ingrained shortcuts developed over millions of years.
These biases are not merely flaws or distortions in our reasoning — they are the very mechanisms through which we interpret the world. This shift in perspective suggests that instead of viewing ourselves as rational agents who sometimes err, we should recognize that our reality is constructed through these heuristic filters. Understanding this can lead to a more nuanced appreciation of human behavior and the limitations of our cognition.
06.02 Reframing Consciousness and Reality
These insights into how the human mind perceives and processes the world have led me to reconsider the classical view of consciousness. Rather than viewing consciousness as a product derived from physics and mathematics, I propose that consciousness is the fundamental basis of our reality. It is through our consciousness that we construct the universe we experience — the economy, laws, society, and more.
Some might argue that this perspective implies solipsism or denies objective reality. While an objective reality may exist, each person experiences it through their own subjective lens, shaped by individual heuristics and cognitive frameworks. In this sense, we each inhabit our own constructed reality, never perceiving the objective world directly. This perspective emphasizes the role of individual consciousness in shaping our experience and highlights the central importance of our heuristics.
06.03 Human Exceptionalism
There is no compelling reason to believe that humans represent the ultimate limit in any domain of cognitive tasks. Our cognitive abilities are the result of evolutionary processes that equipped us with heuristics optimized for survival in specific environments, often involving significant trade-offs against more complex algorithms.
Moreover, it would be surprising if the pinnacle of intelligence and power in any domain were represented by monkeys poorly optimized for survival and reproduction, which, as a side effect, happened to acquire enough intelligence and social skills to take over a planet. It is more plausible that other forms of intelligence could develop heuristics and cognitive frameworks that surpass our own, especially in domains beyond those prioritized by human evolution and especially if explicitly optimized for intelligence.
07 Conclusion
In summary, human perception functions as a form of lossy data compression, distilling vast amounts of sensory input into manageable and relevant information. Similarly, human behavior relies on heuristics — evolved mental shortcuts that enable quick decision-making without exhaustive analysis. Recognizing ourselves as heuristic beings underscores the inherent limitations and adaptations in our understanding of reality and acknowledging the possibility that other forms of intelligence could surpass human cognitive abilities.
