Upvoted for mentioning split brain patients. It made me think of a test of the question “does everyone rationalize”? See whether split brain patients (e.g., ask someone who ask worked with them, or read their writings) vary greatly in the confidence that they assign to their rationalizations of their behavior. All I remember reading of is patients who assign very high confidence to these rationalizations, but that could just be publication bias. If there is large variance and especially if some patients don’t do it much at all (i.e., when their nonverbal hemisphere is cued to do something, their verbal hemisphere says, I don’t really know why I did that action), then that is a sign that some people really don’t rationalize much.
Could be, but they have a lot of time for the other hemisphere to give up explaining, and they have a whole hemisphere there, some of which may not be rationalizing and may prod the rationalizing module with a clue that right side is now independent.
What I’m thinking of, is the possibility that speech works by rationalization-style process. If you consider speech from decision theory perspective—speech is just another instance of making moves that affect the future—in principle it is about as relevant to internal decision making as your spinal cord’s calculations of the muscle activation potentials. The spinal cord doesn’t care what is the reason why you move your hand. The speech module doesn’t need to care what are the reasons you do something; it may have them available, but it’s task is not to relay those reasons, but to produce some sequence of chirps that work best in given circumstances. To build a sequence of chirps to the circumstances.
Furthermore, it is the case that abstract verbal reasoning is fairly ineffective as a decision making tool. In reality, you are not dealing with facts; you aren’t even dealing with probabilities; you are dealing with probability distributions over multidimensional space. For very difficult problems with limited computational power, explicit approach can easily be beaten by heuristics in nearly all circumstances (and the way humans reason explicitly, maybe in all circumstances when pencil and paper are not available to aid the explicit reasoning). It does make sense if explicit abstract reasoning is used primarily for speech construction but not for decision making itself.
Note: we shouldn’t mix up the rationalization with grossly invalid reasoning. The rationalization doesn’t restrict itself to invalid reasoning.
Upvoted for mentioning split brain patients. It made me think of a test of the question “does everyone rationalize”? See whether split brain patients (e.g., ask someone who ask worked with them, or read their writings) vary greatly in the confidence that they assign to their rationalizations of their behavior. All I remember reading of is patients who assign very high confidence to these rationalizations, but that could just be publication bias. If there is large variance and especially if some patients don’t do it much at all (i.e., when their nonverbal hemisphere is cued to do something, their verbal hemisphere says, I don’t really know why I did that action), then that is a sign that some people really don’t rationalize much.
Could be, but they have a lot of time for the other hemisphere to give up explaining, and they have a whole hemisphere there, some of which may not be rationalizing and may prod the rationalizing module with a clue that right side is now independent.
What I’m thinking of, is the possibility that speech works by rationalization-style process. If you consider speech from decision theory perspective—speech is just another instance of making moves that affect the future—in principle it is about as relevant to internal decision making as your spinal cord’s calculations of the muscle activation potentials. The spinal cord doesn’t care what is the reason why you move your hand. The speech module doesn’t need to care what are the reasons you do something; it may have them available, but it’s task is not to relay those reasons, but to produce some sequence of chirps that work best in given circumstances. To build a sequence of chirps to the circumstances.
Furthermore, it is the case that abstract verbal reasoning is fairly ineffective as a decision making tool. In reality, you are not dealing with facts; you aren’t even dealing with probabilities; you are dealing with probability distributions over multidimensional space. For very difficult problems with limited computational power, explicit approach can easily be beaten by heuristics in nearly all circumstances (and the way humans reason explicitly, maybe in all circumstances when pencil and paper are not available to aid the explicit reasoning). It does make sense if explicit abstract reasoning is used primarily for speech construction but not for decision making itself.
Note: we shouldn’t mix up the rationalization with grossly invalid reasoning. The rationalization doesn’t restrict itself to invalid reasoning.