Aka vikalpa, vitarka, vichAra. Purpose could be amusement, prediction, evaluation, planning. It involves understanding, reasoning, empathy.
Understanding, theorizing
This may or may not be probabilistic. It may or may not involve explicit formal reasoning.
This includes empathy.
Role of proability theory
Facile and formal use of probability theory is a good idea. In any case, probability estimation in animal intelligence can be understood using the belief/ Bayesian interpretion of probability theory.
Biases and heuristics
Recall-ease heuristic
Aka Availability heuristic. “If it comes to my mind first, it is more probable.” This causes people to underestimate odds of future pains.
Also, people overestimate their chances of experiencing very low-frequency events, including negative events.
Simulation ease heuristic
“If it is easier to imagine/ visualize, it is more likely to be true.”
Strength of preconceptions
Aka Confirmation bias. The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
“illusion of validity”: When a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with general knowledge, the impression commonly prevails.
Sufficiency vs necessity
\experience{Even when the intellect attempts to act according to the rules of logic, it often makes the mistake of confusing sufficiency for necessity. Eg: This was apparent in my case during GRE practice tests - especially in verbal reasoning.}
Cognitive flexibility
This is the capacity for out-of-box thinking. This depends on acceptence of new input and accessing long-term memory.
Its connection to periodic long term attention is considered elsewhere.
Intelligent animals’ behavior
Identity\ self-concept
Aka ahaMkAra.
Identity is a very useful model/ story used to understand animal behavior, affects and goals. This includes various (overlapping) components like self-concept, social identity, cultural identity, professional identity, and their corresponding ideals.
Identity deeply affects regret, conscience, impulse control, socially responsible behavior etc.. It is affected by habits, close relationships and declarative reasoning
Biases
The way animal behavior is usually modelled in informal thought changes depending on whether one’s own self or someone else is being modelled. This is described in the chapter on decision.
Prediction
Affective impact prediction
Affective impact prediction error
Aka Impact bias: “the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states. In other words, people seem to think that if disaster strikes it will take longer to recover emotionally than it actually does.”
We are often not good at predicting what will make us happy, not at describing what made us happy in the past.