How the mind works: the cheeky topical version.

The mind is the most amazing, lying, cheating, charlatan televangelist ever imagined. It is so good at its job though that one 'part' of the mind can construct a completely false reality and then convince other parts that what it has just constructed is the absolute truth. Not only do other parts of the mind believe this information, they make up extra-information just to justify the original reality constructed. The most important questions though are: Why in the world does the mind have to be such a great con artist? And how does it accomplish this?
In a more formal sense, When a world consists of an infinite amount of information which can be ignored or processed in an infinite number of ways - some of which is unknowable, this leads to serious problems for a system which needs to know when and how to perform these calculations in order to eat, mate, and generally interact with the environment. So how does the mind do this? The simple answer is heuristics.

And the rest is below the fold...

Heuristics are simply any set of rules (and they can range from extremely constrained in the case of line orientation processing, to moderately constrained in the case of language, to extremely unconstrained in the case of religious beliefs) which are designed in order to solve a problem. Heuristics can either be born with or formed through experience. In the case of the mind, the problems heuristics are solving are how to take incoming information in one format, whether its visual, tactile, etc., and transform it into something it can act on. Transformations and actions can be geared toward the environment or can be purely internal.
Because of the infinite nature of the world and the somewhat less than infinite nature of the mind (or really any piece of machinery, no matter how complicated, tasked with figuring out the world) there has to be great amounts of information which are grouped together and smeared over with the broad set of heuristics that make up the mind. This is especially important because of the unsolvable nature of many aspects of the environment, such as the inverse optics problem, or even some seemingly solvable problems, the mind has constructed a number of catch all's, cheats, and perhaps even 'purposely' lacks certain mechanisms, to 'solve' the various problems with which it's presented. The reason for this? The mind needs to be lean, quick, and only tackle the most important problems of survival - calculating complex probabilities is certainly not one of them as Stanford undergrads tested on problem solving by Tversky and Kahneman show us (although more appropriate heuristics can sometimes be formed with experience).
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the human mind is our ability to use heuristics on virtually any type of information as long as it can be translated by the use of categorization, association, or analogy. For example, if I know how to skin a jack rabbit I caught, and as long as I realize that a jack rabbit is just an example of any number of other yummy animals, I can use my knowledge of skinning on just about any other animal in order to eat and have a warm coat for the winter.
So why does the mind have to be like a televangelist? In order to interpret a world that is not 'knowable' the mind must construct a basic set of rules and beliefs to interpret everything that it is able to perceive, and then construct a 'sensible' reality. The mind must also be able to ignore the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that arise from its various conflicting goals coming from different sets of heuristics and the outside world (or the bible in the case of a televangelist).