I think that to some extent or another, we are indeed programmed. From the celestial forces behind evolution to the way your parents raised you to behave in the world. There is reason for all of it. There is some inherit reward system built into the structrue of life. If you are in the group of people that believes that God set the universe in motion, then stood back to observe it, think this: maybe the perfect design is not the human, or the mind. Maybe the perfect design is the reward structure placed into the universe, to reward beneficial behaviors and to avoid others. We as programmers in the reinforcement learning domain create these reward structures, or make a value function to approximate them. We more than anyone understand the difficulty in assigning credit where it is due. This is to say reward on the basis of what? How did we get this reward, from what actions in which states is reward due?
There is much perfection in the universe, literall perfection. So perfect that design is the only real explination. This is exactly why I feel the need to give shit to atheists who tell everyone they're wrong for believing and serving something greater than themselves. This is exactly what is out there, and the scientific pursuit is really to take advanatage and learn this universe that we live in. We are designed to learn, but what is learning and why is it advantaguous to our survival. Well we obviously need to learn things about our enviornment to be able to use them to our advantage, but how exactly would we go about that. What I want to get at, is how a programmer would model this. My solution would be to somehow condense all of the input one is recieving from the world and somehow distill that into its important factors. Pattern recognition in machine learning has shown great promise in the last decade, but why? In its ability to condence information.
One assumption that might seem fairly obvious, but extremely important, is the same amount of information that can be stored higher dimensions can be stored in lower dimensions. There is the simplest way of saying that really complicated behavior has the potenetial to expressed in simple terms. I think that the reward structue in humans kind of promotes this type of behaviors on multiple different levels. We are rewarded for coming up with general solutions for problems throughout our life, maybe a philosophy or religon. We are rewarded both interally and externally, through this socioeconomic heirarchy we built ourselves as well, coming up with ways of doing things that are simple and provide an understanding much simpler than understanding every component individually.
What makes learning possible are two things, competition and a knowledge threshold. There is only so much room, only so much room that information can be stored in, and it is a competition to see how well the room will be used. Let us call one piece of information an explanation. We have a finite amount of these explainaitons. If we choose to accept explanations that encapsulate more of the world around us, we should get a positive reward for this. We do end up getting a positive reward, survival.
I understand the atheist's argument against the evangelical religious folk. It is inplausible to think, for me at least, that there are not parts of the bible or quaran that are exaggerated a bit. Many theories before evolution were denied by the church, one of the most famous being that the sun is the center of the near heavens.