The Beauty of Last-Time’s
I walk down the stairs of Low Plaza. As far as Columbia is concerned, I stand at the center of the universe.
Unknowingly, I filled in the scantron, signed my name under the honor code, finished my last sentence with a period, packed up my backpack, handed in my exam, and walked out of the classroom…
… for the last time.
The gate of memories swings open. Freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.
A part of me just died. Officially.
Ironically, for my very last paragraph of my very last essay on my very last final exam in my college career, I was writing about Jonathan Evan’s theory of the dual-process account of reasoning. Two processes live in our minds, one that is quick, efficient, intuitive, and prone to mistakes; the other slower, effortful, evolutionarily recent, and reliable. The latter accounted for our normative and rational decisions, while the former our irrational and emotional ones.
My last paragraph essentially attacked the field of economics and bashed the assumptions that humans are, for the most part, rational agents and utility maximizers – we are neither. We know to collaborate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, to be altruistic even if it goes against our own well-being; we are situationally adaptive yet universally categorizable; we are at once emotionally rational and rationally emotional.
The philosophers championed reason, enabled by the second system and credited for transforming this planet from soil and plants to concrete and skyscrapers. Yet reason, who has been convincing me that this moment shall be a happy, triumphant one, cannot explain to me my feeling of loss. By tomorrow this moment will seem like a dream, rationalized by reason, and stored away into memory’s abyss.
But right now, this moment is beautiful.
If the second system is distinctively human, then it is the first system that makes us human at all.
