McRib is Back, Part II: The Triumph of Reason

Yesterday, in a brazen act of rationality, I went back to McDonalds and got a McRib meal for lunch and ate it. I did this largely just to prove to myself that I could, and to smash the irrational results-oriented part of me with the sledgehammer of reality. I know that McDonalds has pretty immaculate standards of food cleanliness, making it unlikely that it was the cause of my illness. I also heard that a bunch of other people around my school got sick with similar gastrointestinal problems around roughly the same time I did, and seemingly none of them had eaten McRib or even gone to McDonalds.

Yet, in spite of all of this evidence, part of my brain is still tries to convince me that a causal connection exists where only correlation can be observed. Inferring causation from correlation is something that humans seem pretty much hardwired to do, which makes sense in light of how potentially useful this sort of rudimentary pattern recognition would be in nature. I'm sure my distant ancestors benefited from their aversion to eating any more of those bright red mushrooms in the woods by the stream after they got curious and ate one and nearly died the next day. This is the same basic principle of classical conditioning that allows animals to be trained. Even if this sort of results orientation weren't heritable, it would still certainly be taught, and aspects of it are probably even learned without active instruction during the early stages of development.

This is why I think of eating McRib as a psychosymbolic act of defiant rationality. It's a manifestation of the ability of the complex, high-functioning, uniquely human parts of my brain analyzing reality and coming up with an answer contrary to the one that's being broadcast on full power by my crude reptilian brain. It's the triumph of reason over ignorance, enlightenment over fear, thought over instinct.

I did not get sick.