While not disagreeing with the main thrust here, thinking of compartmentalization as something explicitly selected for may be misleading.
Not everything in an evolved system is explicitly selected for, after all. And it seems at least equally plausible to me that compartmentalization is a side-effect of a brain that incorporates innumerable mechanisms for deriving cognitive outputs (including beliefs, assertions, behaviors, etc.) from inputs that themselves evolved independently.
That is, if each mechanism is of selection-value to its host, and the combination of them is at least as valuable as the sum of them individually, then a genome that happens to combine those mechanisms is selected for. If the additional work to reconcile those mechanisms (in the sense we’re discussing here) either isn’t cost-effective, or just didn’t happen to get generated in the course of random mutation, then a genome that reconciles them doesn’t get selected for.
While not disagreeing with the main thrust here, thinking of compartmentalization as something explicitly selected for may be misleading.
Not everything in an evolved system is explicitly selected for, after all. And it seems at least equally plausible to me that compartmentalization is a side-effect of a brain that incorporates innumerable mechanisms for deriving cognitive outputs (including beliefs, assertions, behaviors, etc.) from inputs that themselves evolved independently.
That is, if each mechanism is of selection-value to its host, and the combination of them is at least as valuable as the sum of them individually, then a genome that happens to combine those mechanisms is selected for. If the additional work to reconcile those mechanisms (in the sense we’re discussing here) either isn’t cost-effective, or just didn’t happen to get generated in the course of random mutation, then a genome that reconciles them doesn’t get selected for.