I really enjoyed your post! I would say we cache things we’ve reasoned out ourselves as well. Say you do a mathematical proof for the pythagorean theorum. At the end of the proof, you might feel you really understand the theory, but the next year, or next day even, you have completely forgotten the steps you used to do the proof. You might be able with great concentration extrapolate them again, but you still believe the theory without recalculating it from scratch. You remember being convinced in the past, and you trust your past self’s judgment. I think this is why it is so impossible to change many people’s minds on highly politicized matters. They remember having been truly convinced by such and such an argument of the correctness of one position, without remembering what exactly the argument was. The feeling of being convinced is what is so hard to forget. Since most people know they are unable to argue themselves, they trust that their inability to counter your points is their failing as an debater, and that if whoever convinced them of X were here, he would know what to say, because his arguments were so convincing. I wonder to what extent we depend upon conclusions we came to long ago and trust as our own today. I’ve personally found that I remember my conclusions a whole lot better than my reasoning or the evidence, and need effort to remind myself. But could we function if we didn’t use these conclusions? How much should we trust our past selves?
I really enjoyed your post! I would say we cache things we’ve reasoned out ourselves as well. Say you do a mathematical proof for the pythagorean theorum. At the end of the proof, you might feel you really understand the theory, but the next year, or next day even, you have completely forgotten the steps you used to do the proof. You might be able with great concentration extrapolate them again, but you still believe the theory without recalculating it from scratch. You remember being convinced in the past, and you trust your past self’s judgment. I think this is why it is so impossible to change many people’s minds on highly politicized matters. They remember having been truly convinced by such and such an argument of the correctness of one position, without remembering what exactly the argument was. The feeling of being convinced is what is so hard to forget. Since most people know they are unable to argue themselves, they trust that their inability to counter your points is their failing as an debater, and that if whoever convinced them of X were here, he would know what to say, because his arguments were so convincing. I wonder to what extent we depend upon conclusions we came to long ago and trust as our own today. I’ve personally found that I remember my conclusions a whole lot better than my reasoning or the evidence, and need effort to remind myself. But could we function if we didn’t use these conclusions? How much should we trust our past selves?