Page 144 - Ray Dalio - Principles

All the laws of reality were given to us by nature. Man didn’t create
these laws, but by understanding them we can use them to foster our
own evolution and achieve our goals. For example, our ability to fly
or to send cell phone signals around the world came from
understanding and applying the existing rules of reality—the
physical laws or principles that govern the natural world.

While I spend most of my time studying the realities that affect
me most directly—those that drive economies, the markets, and the
people I deal with—I also spend time in nature and can’t help
reflecting on how it works by observing, reading, and speaking with
some of the greatest specialists on the subject. I’ve found it both
interesting and valuable to observe which laws we humans have in
common with the rest of nature and which differentiate us. Doing
that has had a big impact on my approach to life.

First of all, I see how cool it is that the brain’s evolution gave us
the ability to reflect on how reality works in this way. Man’s most
distinctive quality is our singular ability to look down on reality
from a higher perspective and synthesize an understanding of it.
While other species operate by following their instincts, man alone
can go above himself and look at himself within his circumstances
and within time (including before and after his existence). For
example, we can ponder the ways that nature’s flying machines,
swimming machines, and billions of other machines, from the
microscopic to the cosmic, interact with one another to make up a
working whole that evolves through time. This is because the
evolution of the brain gave man a much more developed neocortex,
which gives us the power to think abstractly and logically.

While our higher-level thinking makes us unique among species,
it can also make us uniquely confused. Other species have much
simpler and more straightforward lives, without any of man’s
wrestling with what’s good and what’s bad. In contrast with animals,
most people struggle to reconcile their emotions and their instincts
(which come from the animal parts of their brains) with their
reasoning (which comes from parts of the brain more developed in
humans). This struggle causes people to confuse what they want to
be true with what actually is true. Let’s look at this dilemma to try to
understand how reality works.
When trying to understand anything—economies, markets, the
weather, whatever—one can approach the subject with two
perspectives: