btbnnyr wrote:
I think NTs and autistics both give automatic responses like I am fine to questions like how are you.
For tracing back conscious thought processes, people often make up things to rationalize something a certain way, including where certain data came from.
I actually think about it consciously and tell people how I am. Yes I get a lot of strange looks for doing so.
Yes, there is lots of rationalization. I see it most often when things are originated intuitively.
For example if you ask someone why they arrived at their intuitively reached answer then they will often fabricate a semi-rational explanation after the fact. That's rationalization and not really what I called back-tracking steps. It comes in the absence of being able to perceive or remember the actual steps that were used in the process. In the subconscious things are done out of sight in the brain's own language of computation, and so hidden from the conscious.
Rationalized explanations are a combination of incomplete, inconsistent, based on emotion or other imaginary conditionals, sometimes based on false accounts, do not always follow logically (though they may seem emotionally logical), and display other characteristics tied to chronology, or time-reversal.
By the way, any of those characteristics employed in debugging code would fail miserably.