MBTI & Ideas
The Opacity of Mind (Peter Carruthers, 2011)
“But many go further, and endorse a mechanism for self-monitoring our attitudes, or a faculty of “inner sense.”
Those who believe in inner sense really do think that self-knowledge is perception-like, in that it involves a special channel of information to our own mental states,
just as our outer senses provide us with channels of information to properties and events in the world (or within our own bodies). (…)
By monitoring our own learning and reasoning processes we can troubleshoot in cases of mistake or difficulty, and we can exercise some degree of executive control over the course of our own mental lives.
Plainly this requires that some sort of short-term record of the relevant set of mental events should be kept.
One can’t, for example, locate what has gone wrong in a piece of reasoning unless one can recall the steps that one has taken. (…)
We should not, however, expect that mental events should be introspectable beyond the bounds of such a few-second window.
Nor is there any reason to think that long-term memories of mental events should routinely be kept (as opposed to, or in addition to, memories of the worldly events that our thoughts and experiences mostly concern). (…)
If the suggestion made here is correct, then it predicts that people should have very little awareness of the long-term patterns in their conscious mental lives.
Since records of previous thoughts and thought processes aren’t routinely kept (unless a decision is made to rehearse and remember those events), there will be no database that people can consult when constructing generalizations about their own minds.
This prediction is strikingly borne out.
For one of the robust findings in the introspection-sampling literature built up by Hurlburt and colleagues is that it is very common indeed for subjects to make discoveries about the long-term patterns in their thinking and imagining that they had previously never suspected.”