Mitchell Diamond
Nov 5 · 2 min read

Thanks for responding. Since you are a cognitive scientist, I’m a bit hesitant to suggest anything since you assuredly know all that I’m going to say, nevertheless…

I’m an avid fan of popular cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists such as Antonio Damasio, V.S. Ramachandran, Tversky and Kahneman, Timothy Wilson, Cosmides and Tooby, and many others. Of course there’s more that we don’t know than what we do know, but what we do know is that, whether innate or learned, we humans don’t have real insight into our internal motivations. Whatever conscious volition (self-aware control) we perceive happens due to unconscious sources to which we are blind. As Ramachandran says, “Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.”

I’m sure you also know Nisbett and Wilson’s 1977 paper, Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes, in which they say, “The accuracy of subjective reports is so poor as to suggest that any introspective access that may exist is not sufficient to produce generally correct or reliable reports.”

These are some of my articles exploring this theme.

So in a very real sense, human consciousness is self-deceit. We unknowingly and perhaps unintentionally lie to ourselves first before we lie to others. It is the de facto, the standard, and despite how we want it to be, normal.

You say, every sentence can be a lie. But you follow that with, Everyone understands truth uniquely simply because we have no reference to anything but episodic experiences in our minds. If there’s no point of reference for the truth, then there also can’t be a lie. A lie only exists in opposition to the truth (and vice-versa). If our mental processes are opaque and unable to detect actual points of reference, how can we make judgments about much of anything, even tho we do?

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