(Epistemic status: Contains use of the trolley problem, eventually / the whole time, so what do you expect?)
(I'm aware that there are a lot of good, practical reasons to try and figure out whether someone likes you, and that many of these inform the weird extra-importance we place on knowing for sure that we're liked. Try to ignore those strictly practical reasons, if you can, in favour of thinking about why and how we should worry what our friends think on principle)
You are travelling through time when you notice that one of your relationships is heading towards...a hangout? Maybe? Looking back, you had foreseen a hangout at around this time every week,... (read 1169 more words →)
Empirically, I agree with you that some people seem uninterested in or incapable of discussions involving abstract reasoning. It seems like some people have a framework for understanding the world that is highly dissimilar to mine, and which I would not call abstract reasoning. Yet how can one call these people non-reasoning? Is abstract reasoning not a fundamental part of the human experience?
I just can't understand what it would be like, what it would feel like from the inside. Have you broached this idea with your test subjects (who are presumably non-reasoning, under this framework)? How do they react to being told they cannot reason? Reasoning seems to me to be... (read more)