How do you know you're actually reasoning - and not just storytelling? (feddit.uk)

submitted 3 weeks ago by Opinionhaver@feddit.uk to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Everyone likes to believe they’re thinking independently. That they’ve arrived at their beliefs through logic, self-honesty, and some kind of epistemic discipline. But here’s the problem - that belief itself is suspiciously comforting. So how can you tell it’s true?

What if your worldview just happens to align neatly with your temperament, your social environment, or whatever gives you emotional relief? What if your reasoning is just post-hoc justification for instincts you already wanted to follow? That’s what scares me - not being wrong, but being convinced I’m right for reasons that are more about mood than method.

It reminds me of how people think they’d intervene in a violent situation - noble in theory, but until it happens, it's all just talk. So I’m asking: what’s your actual evidence that you think the way you think you do? Not in terms of the content of your beliefs, but the process behind them. What makes you confident you’re reasoning - not just rationalizing?

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[-] Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 0 points 3 weeks ago

You might be referring to the split-brain experiments, where researchers studied patients who had their brain hemispheres separated by cutting the corpus callosum – the “bridge” between the two sides.

In these experiments, text can be shown to only one eye, allowing researchers to communicate with just one hemisphere without the other knowing. The results are fascinating for several reasons, especially because each hemisphere demonstrates different preferences and gives different answers to the same questions. This naturally raises the question: “Which one is you?”

Another striking finding, similar to what you were referring to, is that researchers can give instructions to the non-verbal hemisphere and then ask the verbal one to explain why it just performed a certain action. Since it doesn’t know the real reason, it immediately starts inventing excuses – ones the researchers know to be false. Yet the participant isn’t lying. They genuinely believe the made-up explanation.

As for consciousness, I think you might be using the term a bit differently from how it's typically used in philosophical discussions. The gold standard definition comes from Thomas Nagel’s essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, where he defines consciousness as the fact of subjective experience – that it feels like something to be. That existence has qualia. This, I (and many others) would argue, is the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 3 weeks ago

You might be referring to the split-brain experiments, where researchers studied patients who had their brain hemispheres separated by cutting the corpus callosum – the “bridge” between the two sides.

Nope, I would have described the split-brain experiments if that's what I was referring to. I dug around a bit to find a direct reference and I think it was Movement Intention After Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans by Desmurget et al. In particular:

the fact that patients experienced a conscious desire to move indicates that stimulation did not merely evoke a mental image of a movement but also the intention to produce a movement, an internal state that resembles what Searle called “intention in action”

I did misremember the fact that they only felt the intention to move, they didn't actually move their limbs when those brain regions were stimulated.

A related bit of research I dug up on this reference hunt that I'd forgotten about but is also neat; Libet in the 1980s, who used observation of the timing of brain activity to measure when a person formed an intention to do something compared to when they became consciously aware that they had formed an intention to do something. There was a significant delay between those two events, with the intention coming first and only later with the conscious mind "catching up" and deciding that it was going to do the thing that the brain was already in the process of doing.

As for consciousness, I think you might be using the term a bit differently from how it's typically used in philosophical discussions.

Probably, I'm less interested in philosophy than I am in actual measurable neurology. The whole point of all this is that human introspection appears to be flawed, and a lot of philosophy relies heavily on introspection. So I'd rather read about people measuring brain activity than about people merely thinking about brain activity.

This, I (and many others) would argue, is the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion.

You can argue it all you like, but in the end science requires evidence to back it up.

[-] Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 1 points 3 weeks ago

Then what do you mean when you're using the word "consciousness"? Whose definition are you going by?

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 3 weeks ago

Loosely, the awareness of our own actions and the reasons why we do them. The introspective stuff that the research I linked to is about.

The specific word doesn't really matter to me much. Substitute a different one if you prefer. Semantic quibbling is more of what I leave to the philosophers.

this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025

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