The Philosophy of Thought

On selecting apartments, predicting future enjoyment, and enjoying canine company.

My wife and I, in the process of selling our home while renovating another, have found ourselves in a bit of a bind; it seems we will have to find a temporary place to live. Claiming short term reduction in her cognitive ability due to advanced pregnancy (who am I to claim otherwise), my wife has delegated to me the process of thinking through our rental options. I find the task and the factors to be considered bewildering: There is the cost of the rental accommodation, the number of bedrooms, the degree to which it is furnished or unfurnished, the minimum rental period, the broker's fee, the location, the parking available… Each of these factors must be measured and compared through some system of relative importance that keeps tripping me up. Unfortunately, my wife's cognitive ability is not so impaired that she's unable to point out the flaws in my approach to solving the problem. I've realized that I don't often think very hard about such things. That I tend to pick an obvious criterion and let that determine my choice.

Applying conscious decision making is quite hard. Made more difficult, no doubt, by our predilection for keeping our options open (as I wrote about yesterday).

Harvard Psychologist Daniel Gilbert has conducted experiments that seem to indicate that people aren't very good at predicting to what extent they will enjoy a particular activity, and he thinks he's found out why. Gilbert believes that people compare enjoyment of a projected experience to certain imagined alternatives — lying on a beautiful beach versus sitting in a frigid office, for instance — whereas when lying on a beautiful beach the enjoyment will be what it is, no more or less.

This seems to coincide with common human experience: Fun things can be a bore. Dreaded things can be quite fun.

And in another experiment, this one quite bizarre, researchers pitted a robot dog against a real dog in a challenge to see who could win the hearts and improve the spirits of people in a nursing home. The study showed that the real dog had little if any therapeutic advantage over the robot dog. (Any dog was better than no dog at all.)

These three examples can, I think, tell us a good deal about the philosophy of thought.

1. The perplexing apartment decision: We tend to think rationally and analytically less than we imagine we do. Much of what we pass off as thought results from a subconscious or arbitrary choice that we then rationalize.

2. The poor predictive ability: We aren't very good at thinking about reality. We tend to color or editorialize our thinking.

3. The response to the robot dog: Our conscious thinking process can be easily bypassed or fused by emotional or subconscious impulses.

These phenomena seem to be connected by a common theme: We think less than we think we do; and we are perhaps primarily governed by subconscious or non-rational impulses.

But, rationally, this perhaps isn't surprising. Much of what we do works just fine without overt rational analysis. The additional cost of analyzing something rationally doesn't pay off. Further, to arrive at a rational decision can often be complex or impossible. with so many variables and so much uncertainty, thinking things through may be impossible.

The problem is that we're often not aware of the difference between rational thought and rationalizing. We're so used to sidestepping logic that we don't always recognize and respond correctly to those situations where logic would really help us out. And in those cases, if we make a poor choice, we end up acting or looking stupid…

For more rational, science-based explanations of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.