Adapted Minds

Minds are obscure things. This is especially obvious and especially onerous to those interested in understanding the mind. One way to begin an investigation of mind, given its abstruseness, is to explore the implications of something we believe must be true of minds. This is the approach I take in this paper. Whatever uncertainties we have about the mind, it’s a safe bet that the mind is an adaptation. So, I begin with this truth about minds: minds are the product of evolution by natural selection. In what follows, I trace some of the consequences of this fact. Doing so will take us some distance toward answering a variety of questions about the mind.