Assumptions are a funny business. Think of them as a kind of cache. We absolutely must cache most of our beliefs about reality. It would quickly overwhelm us

Assumptions are a funny business. Think of them as a kind of cache. We absolutely must cache most of our beliefs about reality. It would quickly overwhelm us to compute every thought response to everyday stimuli. Many people think of the neocortex as a big computational device. In reality the data structure contributes more to our intelligence. In half a second we can easily recognize a familiar object. In that time, a signal can traverse perhaps 100 neurons. A cpu takes several orders of magnitude more. It is much more likely that we are retrieving most reactions rather than computing them. I highly recommend Jeff Hawkins' book "On Intelligence" if you want to learn more about this fascinating subject. But many of these cached computations have a timeout that we fail to honor. In fact everything that goes into the cache is information about a reality that no longer exists as it did. We nevertheless get so much utility from the old cache that it can be easy to forget to prune and update it. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Which leads to another interesting thing about assumptions. Your assumptions are always wrong. They probably yield a good amount of utility for you, but on some level they are incomplete at the very least. All of the items you pull out of your cache are improvable. Another way to look at it is that nearly all of our potential lies in the set of things that we currently reject.