John Tooby, with Leda Cosmides, pioneered evolutionary psychology, the view that the mind is built from specialized programs. In 2009 Edge asked what will change everything. His answer, The Great Pivot, holds this passage:
Humanity will continue to be blind slaves to the programs that evolution has built into our brains until we drag them into the light. Ordinarily, we only inhabit the versions of reality they spontaneously construct for us — the surfaces of things. Because we are unaware we are in a theater, with our roles and our lines largely written for us by our mental programs, we are credulously swept up in these plays (such as the genocidal drama of us versus them). Endless chain reactions among these programs leave us the victims of history — embedded in war and oppression, enveloped in mass delusions and cultural epidemics, mired in endless negative sum conflict. If we understand these programs and the coordinated hallucinations they orchestrate in our minds, our species could awaken from the roles these programs assign to us.
I read this as the reality side of my domain-specific models. The models do not only filter the world. They write the version of it we live in. Knowing that is vital to keeping them in check. His “drag them into the light” is what I call reflexivity, and his “us versus them” is the ground cultural cognition covers.