“Communicative Introspective Adaptivism.
Likely because I was :
[EDIT: you can skip to conclusion which I didn’t know what it would be until I wrote all this first]*
1) raised around positive psychology rather than analytic psychotherapy and
2) did not get much exposure to western philosophical questionings until I made a conscious choice to tackle that demon in Facebook philosophy groups about 8 years ago – and for VERY POSSIBLY due to
3) ADHD or GAD and early trainings/interests- my starting points are different than you and Saul Saul on this.
1) “I think therefore I am” I always read as a self-motivational, an “attaboy Rene! You DO exist!” (positive psychology)
2) Philosophy never ‘clicked’ with me until talking about it with people in these groups in my 40s. I struggled because everybody seemed to have a lot of assumptions about things that I didn’t; took a year to finally understand ontology vs epistemology and use them correctly in sentences.
3) I am in CONSTANT DOUBT mode.
a) That is ,my brain catastrophizes all the time. I doubt my every decision and doubt my doubtings too. It’s just part of the self-talk murmur and I don’t ‘feel bad’ about it. It’s just a constant companion. That’s GAD – the “always worrying”, although some say that’s an ADHD thing but phenomenologically, it’s what it is.
THEREFORE because I doubt my self-talk, I TRUST my Intuition. “The Still Small Voice”. My ‘gut’ knows better than I, but I need to talk it through with myself just the same.
” clarity is an ineffective heuristic for prediction and decision making” as Saul says HOWEVER, that is all I’m able to work with well and I think I know why:
b) Hierarchical bayesian brain.
I “don’t believe” in bayesian generally. The whole thing seems like ridiculous magic. “Updating priors” means you need a strong prior. Well, if you’re constantly self-doubting, where the priors at?
Confirmed for me in a paper about possible hierarchical bayesian models of the brain, the hypothesis being that NOISY PRIORS environment blots out confidence in priors, placing excess importance in whatever’s at hand, even though the priors are working fine.
Malfunctioning bayesian means loss of confidence in bayesian itself but it works for most people? Now I can work with that as a model. I don’t have to believe in it as it no longer matters whether I fit in it or not; I can treat it as “as if”.
THEREFORE:
I tend to work with “AS IF’. I treat things “AS IF they might be true”.
Any confidence I have in ‘truths’ is always subject for revision as to minimize surprise of being wrong yet I still have to live life and I DON’T WANT to doubt all the time. I just do.
So everything is provisional, contextual, happenstance, built on firm sand. I want cartesian to be true; I love the certainty at which it all operates and wish that for myself yet my experience dictates cartesian to not be true, ..
>.and yet, I know I can’t trust my experience.
That said, I proclaim “universal truths” as much as anybody but they’re aspirations looking for feedback from others so I can substitute their attaboys for my noisy priors.
FINALLY FINALLY: I would say that at my basis is COMMUNICATION; and it is this ability to COMMUNICATE that confers TRUTH VALUE.
This absolves “reason” as having a privileged status and allows for ANY feedback loop to operate as “sand-firming” / “confidence building” / “motivational”.