"I Don't Know Why I Chose That" Is Almost Never True. There's Always a Reason — It's Just Rarely a Conscious One.
"I don't know why I chose that" is a common and genuinely sincere thing to say — the person really doesn't have conscious access to a reason at the moment they're asked. Taken literally, though, as evidence that no reason exists, the statement is almost never accurate; choices aren't typically made by nothing.
What's actually true is narrower: there's no reason available to conscious introspection in that moment, which is a different claim than there being no reason at all. The selection mechanism that produced the choice was operating, and operating according to some rule, even though that rule wasn't accessible to the part of the mind doing the explaining afterward.
This distinction matters because it changes where to look for the actual answer. If no reason existed, there'd be nothing to find. Since a reason almost certainly does exist, just not consciously accessible, the answer is findable — not through more direct introspection, which has already been tried and failed, but through examining the pattern of what actually gets chosen across enough instances to extract the rule from outside.
"I don't know why" is honest about the limits of conscious access. It's not evidence that the choice was reasonless — it's a pointer toward exactly where the actual reason is hiding: somewhere introspection alone doesn't reach.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai