Paul Buchheit: The first thing that you need to understand about humans

This is the reason I allow myself full latitude in arguing with people, including the freedom to change my mind completely from one argument to the next. After all, whatever your opinion is right now, it's only the best you've come up with so far - a better, truer truth may be just around the corner. This unsettles some people, when they hear my passionately arguing a point one week, and then passionately arguing the opposite point the next week.

This is also why I make a conscious effort to allow opposing viewpoints to exist in my head. After all, both might be true - even together. Just because I've rationalised them to be opposing doesn't mean they're not both true.

An interesting point that's not made in the article is how to train this rationalisation engine. It's a very powerful tool, that brain of ours, and I believe there are ways to feed our subconscious with "good data" that it can use for more effective heuristics. I'd argue that reading good books (particularly classics) does a tremendous job of making our subconscious more effective.

"V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: He was articulate, he was intelligent, not obviously psychotic or emotionally disturbed. He could read a newspaper. Everything seemed fine except he had one profound delusion. He would look at his mother and he would say, "This woman, Doctor, she looks exactly like my mother but in fact she's not my mother. She's an imposter. She's some other woman pretending to be my mother.

NARRATOR: The injury to David's brain had brought on a very rare condition called the Capgras Delusion"

...

NARRATOR: Whenever we look at an object or a face, the message reaches the temporal lobes, where it's identified, but then it gets relayed to a structure called the "amygdala," which is the gateway to the limbic system that contains the emotional centers of the brain. And it's here that we generate the appropriate emotional response to whatever it is we're looking at.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Now, what I've suggested is that what's going on in this patient is the message gets to the temporal lobe cortex, so the patient recognizes his mother as being his mother and evokes the appropriate memories. But the message doesn't get to the amygdala, because the fibers going from the temporal cortex to the amygdala into the emotional centers are cut, as a result of the accident. Therefore, there is no emotion. There is no warmth. And he says, "If this is really my mother why is it I'm not experiencing any emotions? There's something not quite right here. Maybe she is some other strange woman pretending to be my mother."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2812mind.html

Conduct the "umbrella" experiment with a child about 3-5 years old. His answer will be " I do not know". Honest, right?

As kids we always expressed our feelings and thoughts properly and truthfully through words and actions. But, somewhere between the age of 4 and 9 we start to have others think for us. We are thought sets of realities that mostly make no sense to us (as children).

By the time we reach 13 we already have all this new man made reality that we are supposed to live and think by without much questioning.

So this creates a massive database of words and actions we go to first to express our thoughts and feelings.

By doing this we ignore our highest truth. We create a conflict between what we put our there and what we really feel and know inside. There begins the war within ourselves.

We almost cannot reverse engineer in months what we have created in millenniums. I do not think this mass change in the way we think is going to happen in our lifetime.

But we can stop stopping our kids to think for themselves. Stop giving them sets of realities that are contradictory to their real honest and pure feelings and thoughts. You would think this would create an anarchy, but we will land far from that.

Functional software that perfectly solves a customer's problem without a good user interface never makes it to the logic step. It was eliminated by the user's subconscious before the game ever began.

We are not doomed to always be irrational. We can create knowledge and, with effort, remove errors from it. Then, when we have supporting knowledge, we can act reasonably rationally.