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🧕almost everything is unconscious

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Essays about how humans deal with information: digitization, trust & society, biases & reasoning, and making our digitized information landscape truth-friendly
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🧕almost everything is unconscious

Falsifiable Friday #3

Maarten van Doorn
Jul 23, 2021
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🧕almost everything is unconscious

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Happy Friday! 😁

🧠 According to the most plausible view in the philosophy of mind, the mind is a collection of mental capacities or faculties – of intuitive inference systems. Where the “inference” part just means that they handle information, and produce modified information, according to some rules. And the “intuitive” part just means that they deliver said output, for example, the impression that a day was good or an argument bad, without us being aware of what computations led to that conclusion.

🎓For instance, reasoning relies on intuitions about reasons – about whether a given premise is a good reason to accept a given conclusion. And people, it turns out, usually have little conscious access into why they have these intuitions.

😯 We base our judgments on an intuition, but the cues that give rise to that intuition are not accessible and something we have to guess. This happens way more often that you’d think.

🤷‍♀️ How this works exactly, and what this implies about how you should treat what you and others say about the causes of their judgments and behaviors, is the topic of this week’s essay. Enjoy!

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