- Stimulus
- Subconscious brain concludes something
- Face reflects emotion based on conclusion
- Near the same time:
- Conscious brain receives the conclusion
- Body starts reacting
- Conscious brain makes up reasons for conclusion.
The normal state of affairs is that conclusions are made by the subconscious, and then justified by the conscious mind.
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5 comments:
Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go...to explain how the subconscious behaves.
People say this like it's some great insight into our Deep & Abiding Irrationality. Guess what? All reasons are made up. It doesn't matter if it's about ethics or politics or physics or psychology. The justifications, too. But you can still follow a line of reasoning and see all the ways it goes wrong. And if you let yourself, you can confabulate explanations for your behavior. And if you let yourself, you can confabulate explanations for why it's really the Sun that goes around the Earth. OR, you can try to be honest. There is no magical difference between the two. Take your smug "rationality" and shove it up your ass. No offense.
TAANSTAALF,
Nude sunbathing? :)
1. No smugness.
2. The post is about the difficulty of being honest. The question we're facing is "how hard is it to trust your own honesty".
If my model of human cognition is correct, then each of us should always be skeptical of our own attempts at honesty...we should believe it highly likely that we are actually rationalizing even when we have convinced ourselves that we are not. Of course, this leads to a boatload of epistemic humility. Each of us is probably wrong a lot about our own motivations, and about many/most of our conclusions, even after careful analysis.
If you're chasing truth, you're stuck with massive uncertainty.
Apparently you think it's an easier problem than that? And that you can avoid being self-deceived? And that therefore you're allowed to be more certain?
I deleted my last comment because I used the phrase "boy do I". lol
>I was just venting. And sure, accurate metacognition is hard, but these facts gets bandied about as if they imply that any explanation people have for their own behavior is automatically wrong... and should be replaced with [your brand of cynicism here]
Then I said something critical of "one-trick cynics", a coinage which I'm going to copyright. And now I want to point out a certain irony: I am a one-trick cynic (duh), for the time being. Once my opinion on the ~ LessWrong / OvercomingBias / capital-s Skeptic crowd crystallizes I'll move on. Hopefully. And "One-Trick Cynic" might be a better pseudonym than the monstrosity that is "TANSTAALF".
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