knowledge, conformism and decision making

Earlier (below: "all there is to know about free will") I suggested, following numerous contemporary thinkers and researchers in the field of cognition, that there is no such thing as "free will", so that decision-making is an automated process which does not involve responsibility but is in the end biologically determined. I also suggested that the fact that we think that we have a free will is useful inasmuch as it involves a motivation for action. I added that knowledge is crucial to decision making, as is also desire and various emotions.

Lucas Chranach the Elder: 'Tree of knowledge'

If understood that way, decision-making has a 'fitness' dimension, which I cannot call appropriately, not being a specialist of these notions, but that one may call a 'goal' of 'fitting with the real'. The notion of goal is complex and probably unnecessary when one thinks of such processes as automatic and spontaneous. Nonetheless, the course of actions involved by human decision-making, organized as it is, plays a crucial role in enhancing survival - in all its numerous forms, from mere life-preservation to being better-off. Moral decisions can be seen in this light too if one admits that they are also tied to survival in that sense, through a notion involving the social group and thus others.

A very simple conclusion arises. What makes up for better decisions is better knowledge. That's obviously a commonsensical view, and as such there is nothing surprising in here. Except, maybe, that one can go one step further: what is likely to provide a better living for all is knowledge, not social codes adopted without knowledge and investigation. 

Isn't education supposed to increase knowledge? Why are our Western educational systems so obsessed with 'social codes'? There is something very primitive in conforming to precepts originating elsewhere than in knowledge. The discussion now opens towards what makes us humans and what we carry as social  animals. As for me, I will stop right here, only noting that accepting to conform to a social code without intellectually endorsing it lead to the elimination of decision-making in humans. Actually a social code, in particular a set of moral commandments, do provide ready-made interest-weighing, so that our cognitive system doesn't even have to deal with various types of knowledge.

Social codes, religious codes, etc., are indeed very economical. Their trade-off is that they prevent the work of natural rationality, which takes knowledge as input, not behavior patterns, and thus allow massive crimes without a notion that there was any decision to take (not surprising, by the way, that God wanted man to keep away from the Tree of Knowledge (even if that knowledge is about 'good' and 'evil'). 

This is why I fear conformism.