I don't understand. Much of our self-identity is symbolic and imaginary. By self-created reality do you mean that our local reality is heavily influenced by us? That our beliefs filter our experiences somewhat? Or that we literally create our own reality? If it's the last one, the standard response is this: There is a process that generates predictions and a process that generates experiences, they don't always match up, so we call the former "beliefs" and the latter "reality". See the map and territory sequence. If that's not what you mean (I hope it is not), make your point.

You have heard of Niche Construction right? If not, it is the ability of an animal to manipulate their reality to meet their personal adaptations. Most animals display some sort of niche construction. Humans are highly advanced architects of niches. In the same way ants build colonies and bees build hives, humans create a type of social hive that is infinitely more complex. The human hive is not built through wax or honey but through symbols and rituals held together by rules and norms. A person living within a human hive cannot escape the necessity of understanding the dynamics of the symbols that hold it together so that they can most efficiently navigate its chambers. Keeping that in mind, it stands that all animals must respect the nature of their environment in order to survive. What is unique to humans is that the environments we primarily interact with are socially constructed niches. That is what I mean when I say human reality is self-created.

Earlier I talked about the paradox of rationality. What I meant by that is simply

-For humans what is socially beneficial is rationally beneficial because human survival is dependent on social solidarity. -What is socially beneficial is not always actually beneficial to the individual or the group.

Thus the paradox of rationality: What is naturally beneficial/harmful is not aligned with what is socially beneficial/harmful.

While our internal models of reality are not always "logical", I would argue that they are quite predictable (though not perfectly so). Just to make up a random example, I can confidently predict that the number of humans on Earth who believe that the sky is purple with green polka dots is vanishingly small (if not zero).

I am not trying to be rude or aggressive here, but I just wanted to point out that your argument is based upon a fairly deceptive rhetorical tactic. The tactic is to casually introduce an example as though it were a run of the mill example, but in doing so pick an extreme. You are correct that a person with a normally functioning visual cortex and no significant retina damage can be predicted to seeing the sky in a certain way, but that does not change the fact that a large portion of human existence is socially created. Why do we stop at stop lights or stop signs? There is nothing inherent in the color read that means stop, in other cultures different colors or symbols signify the same thing. We have arbitrarily chosen read to mean stop.

Some things can be logically predicted given the biological capacity of humans, but it is within the biological capacity of humans to create symbolic meaning. We know this to be fact, and yet we are unable to as easily predict what it is that people believe, because unlike the color of the sky major issues of the social hive are not as empirically clear. Issues about what constitutes life, what is love, what is happiness, what is family are in some cases just as arbitrarily defined as what means stop and what means go, but these questions are of much graver concern.

Just to clarify, It is not that I do not think there is a way to rationally chose symbolic narrative, but that initiating rational narrative involves understanding the processes by which narratives are constructed. That does not mean abandoning rationality, but abandoning the idea of universal rationality. Instead I believe rationalists should focus more on understanding the irrationality of human interaction to use irrational means to foster better rationality.