I first ran into Dr. Burton's research by Arnold Kling. Here is an Burton interview for starters. Dr. Burton refers to the mistake of complete certainty, it is a false emotion; life's alternatives come from the slight uncertainty of things. The QM physicists say such things.
To the point, Certainty and its inhibition are layered, not symmetrical, in the brain. Certainty (impulse to action) is the older brain function, likely olfactory; the Limbic system starts the inhibition process, widening the width of certainty we find comfortable.
Cutting to the chase, I think we are pulse frequency modulated stuff trackers, we track the frequency of arrival of good stuff. Our ability to track events, seasons, grazing routes, the herd; all that must have tuned itself to the ebb and flow of generational life, our brains are probably preset to the certain frequencies of the regular events in life. We are a tuned tracker of good stuff. Operating with a fixed uncertainty has benefits.
This conservation of work that evolution does, it discoiunts infrequent events, minimizing the certainty that matches the mammal to the environment. Thus it can fit simple trackers into unique environments, devoting more time working on running, jumping, etc.
It gets us to a simple Kalman filter tracker with fixed uncertainty, tuned to the plains of Africa. Buyers and sellers judge each other, ultimately, by the arrival rates, hence in our search for a tuned environment, we create one, inadvertently, like with a Hidden Hand.
Yes, Kling reminds me of this Tim Harford post on why poor nations often stay that way. At the heart is the inability of poor societies to maintain the repeatability of goods flow. So this approach of necessity emphasizes the development of transportation.
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