I discovered that one of my friends has something similar - perhaps the same thing - going on in her brain, such that she doesn't rationalise. What we managed to sort out, sort of, was that anything was a justification for her: so when she doesn't eat cookies because it would make her gain weight, and also when she doesn't like Brad Pitt "because he's ugly", and also when she doesn't like a book series because it's chauvinistic, and also when she "doesn't like babies", but her friend's baby "is an exception because it's [friend]'s", these all feel like the same thing to her; she can't or won't tell the difference between what I see as a strong reason or a weak reason or a made-up flimsy reason.
A wild theory appears! In probably the deepest moment of introspection for her in that discussion, she said she thinks she might be like this because it gives her 100% confidence in whatever she's doing. Thinking on that, I'm in the mind of the "70% blue, 30% red balls in the urn" game where some human guessers approximate a 7:3 ratio of blue/red guesses, whereas the best strategy is to guess blue all the time. There might be two kinds of people in this sense: "modellers", who try to accurately mirror reality as much as possible in order to have good predictive skills, and "one-guessers" who commit to the best pure strategy in order to gain the most reward.
Under this wild theory, the one-guessers would have no reason or need to distinguish between the strength of justifications; they'd simply change their behaviour when a better strategy is offered.
"The Limbic system area is the center that is in charge of the immediate reactions in the human brain and is located above the Brainstem. It receives the information from our sense organs even before our thinking brain - Neocortex has processed it, in order to operate emotional instincts that allow an immediate reaction such as self defense. The rational thought and more complex emotional processes are completed only after a few seconds.
After the rational processing, one of the two following will occur:
The person will rationalize his/her immediate em
Anna Salamon and I are confused. Both of us notice ourselves rationalizing on pretty much a daily basis and have to apply techniques like the Litany of Tarski pretty regularly. But in several of our test sessions for teaching rationality, a handful of people report never rationalizing and seem to have little clue what Tarski is for. They don't relate to any examples we give, whether fictitious or actual personal examples from our lives. Some of these people show signs of being rather high-level rationalists overall, although some don't.