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?
It’s funny. I’ve seen research about LLMs “reasoning” and “introspecting” that has shown that they make up stories when you ask them why they answered questions in certain ways that don’t match how their neurons actually fired, and a common response in the comments is to triumphantly crow about how this shows they’re not “self aware” or “actually thinking” or whatever.
But it may be the same with humans. There’s been fun experiments where people would have neurons artificially stimulated in their brains that cause them to take some action, such as reaching out with their hand, and then when you ask them why they did that they’ll say - and believe - that they did it for some made-up reason like they were just stretching or that they wanted to pick something up. Even knowing full well that they’re in an experiment that’s going to use artificial stimulus to make them do that.
I suspect that much of what we call “consciousness” is just made up after-the-fact to explain to ourselves why we do the things that we do. Maybe even all of it, for all we currently know. It’s a fun shower thought to ponder, if nothing else. And perhaps now that we’ve got AI to experiment with in addition to just our messy organic brains we’ll be able to figure it all out with more rigor. Interesting times ahead.
I’m not terribly concerned about it, though. If it turns out that this is how we’ve been operating all along, well, it’s how we’ve been operating all along. I’ve liked being me so far, why should that change when the curtain’s pulled back and I can see the hamster in the wheel that’s been making me work like that all along? It doesn’t really change anything, and I’d like to know.