A human’s mind looks at the world and sees problems. Not bad problems (not always). Not broken or stressful problems. Just situations that need resolution. Or that *may* need resolution.
By approaching every single view of the world as a situation to be worked out our brains allow us to continuously optimize, to continuously attempt to benefit from innovation and alteration our environment.
A chimpanzee takes hundreds of trials to solve and learn a simple option problems. Black things go into the right bucket, white things go into the left bucket. But a human when confronted with the same situation will examine the scenario and instantly know that there ARE options and that there may be an optimal solution. And with just one or two trials will figure out the best way, will learn the most beneficial behavior (they get a treat for performing the trial correctly).
Humans have a built in “question everything” directive. Humans are imbued with a sense that they can change their environment to better suit themselves and their social group. For instance, we can walk into a room that appears cluttered with furniture and our natural proclivity would be to rearrange the chairs and couches and tables so as to make it a more livable room. We don’t try to do this. It just happens in our brains. Only humans do this. A chimpanzee would never try and rearrange their environment to better suit them. They would just climb over the furniture to get from one side to the other. (Aside from building a bed or nest when it comes time to sleep.)
We see problems. And in seeing problems (non-optimal situations) we envision solutions.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 