Wednesday 7 April 2010

Conjecture based reasoning



It turns out that a person can create a world about another person entirely based on it's own thinking isolated from real life or any verification. When we lack information we have to think about possibilities. We have to think what another person thinks. We could do it for number of reasons but there is no harm in doing it in order to protect ourselves. What if they are lying? What if they want to hurt us, etc? During that process, depending on complexity of our brain we can create a whole new world about a certain person without him or her realizing it. The problem is that, this is often based on pure conjecture. Conjecture based reasoning is really hard. If it is done without historical data about a person, for example, if they have lied to us before and we have detected that lie or they told us, we tend to loose trust. If it is based on a moment, emotion, then conjecture based thinking can create an entirely false perception of another person. How to verify it? You can talk to a person and ask them if this is something they meant. They can lie to you though. This is very hard and many people do fail and draw completely wrong conclusions from conjecture based reasoning about someone.

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