So there were reasons long before there were reason-representers—us. The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales,” a term that has apparently jangled the nerves of some few thinkers, who suspect I am conjuring up ghosts of some sort. Not at all. Free-floating rationales are no more ghostly or problematic than numbers or centers of gravity. Cubes had eight corners before people invented ways of articulating arithmetic, and asteroids had centers of gravity before there were physicists to dream up the idea and calculate with it. Reasons existed long before there were
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