For years, I've been stumped by the failure of most people, of society, to make simple and important inferences. They have the facts, it's important to them, and yet they do not put two and two together. How do they fail so?

Well, last week, a friend's comment suggested a trailhead for an explanation. This is part 1 of a ~4-part series where I share my current guess.

You know how to walk. When did you last think about contracting your quads?

You know how to talk. When did you last think about the placement of your tongue?

You know how to think. When did you last think about...the individual mental motions that make up the larger thought-acts you intentionally carry out?

Like walking, talking, and most actions, thinking is non-atomic. Any act of thinking is composed of sub-thoughts, micro-cognitions, and individual mental motions. And in comparison to walking and talking, the variety is staggering. There are only so many practical ways to walk, but the ways your mind could carry out a given thought-act are numerous.

Start with the example of answering something simple: where to get to lunch? You begin considering two options: the taqueria and the sushi place. Why those two? Your mind wordlessly queried "options" and that's what came back. The broader line of thought found that satisfactory and didn't push for more. On another day, your thinking would be querying what you felt like and hunting for justifications to pay the high sushi prices. Today that doesn't occur to you, instead the wordless considerations query came back with "what would your lunch companions like most?" (marked important) since you are choosing for them too.

My goal here isn't to suggest a definite or rigorous taxonomy of thought, more to gesture at the breakdown. Much of thinking seems to proceed in chains: trigger/response/trigger/response/trigger/response where both previous thought-responses and new events in the world can be new triggers. This makes you think of that, that makes you think of this, makes you think of that. Along the way there are wordless queries for information that some part of your mind provides. How and why? We don't usually think about that. You ask a question like what I should be doing right now and a list is produced as if from nowhere. Perhaps another part of your mind remembers that you're often forgetful and should consult your ca...

Why people are mad (aka the underappreciated differences in learned cognition)

Why people are mad (aka the underappreciated differences in learned cognition)