How to think, not what to think.

Random Ruminations:

When homeschooling my daughter, I'm trying to focus on teaching her processes that she can use later in life.. how to find information, how to think, as opposed to forcing her to regurgitate dry facts. I'm starting to think that my own education is lacking in one area that may be a building block for building a soundly rational mind. I'm working on cobbling it together.

I've read "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. Some good source material there. He likens moral judgements to an elephant with a rider on its back. The moral system kicks in with an intuitive judgement and then the rider perched atop the back starts making post hoc rationalizations for that moral choice.

This seems to fit well with previous reading I've done on Wikipedia regarding confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. I can see some similarities in several of Wikipedia's list of logical fallacies. Today, in my reading.. (I do a lot of that...) I encountered a phrase "motivated reasoning" which seems to dovetail quite nicely with this amorphous collection of suspicion.

Essentially, the picture of human reasoning in my mind is less like a search light and more like a tangled mass of oozy Lovecraftian tentacles. Depressing as this seems; it appears more consistent with the train of reasoning I've observed from people.

I have a suspicion that somewhere underneath all these types of unsound reasoning lies the mechanism which may explain hypnosis. The mind likes harmony, patterns, predictability, regularity. Hypnosis starts like that, establishing a rhythm, a pattern. Music and poetry both captivate and inspire; both have an orderliness. Palindromes or chiasmatic structures of bible prose intrigue by their symmetry. The beauty of a face or a structure seems likely to be keyed to the symmetry of proportions, lines, and angles. The hypnotist creates a rhythmic structure to his narrative which would activate some circuit in the brain that seeks to find patterns and is pleased when they are found. The hypnotist then associates, as if by contagion, his droning pattern with thoughts he wishes to implant in the subject. The subject's mind being rendered pliable by the pleasing rhythmic pattern does not wish to reject the suggestions and therefore leave the quite peaceful pleasure. Willfully rejecting the hypnotist's words would break the pleasant "look, look, patterns" moment. Falling out the the reverie would cause "cognitive dissonance" or stress. The mind having accepted a pleasant pattern, wishes to protect the pattern it has found. The mind then turns towards confirmation bias, making the hypnotist's words seem more reasonable and giving them greater credibility than they deserve. They may engage in a line of "motivated reasoning" to remain entranced. (For example, some hypnotized subject claim they were merely playing along with the hypnotist.)

As I only just recently discussed the Scientific Method in my daughter's Science Club, it seems to me that I might consider drawing a lesson together for her regarding logic, reasoning, logical fallacies, and the like. There seems so much, however, that I'm not sure where to begin tackling the beast. Perhaps, I could start with a discussion of magical thinking as an example of flawed logic and work from there.

What is Motivated Reasoning