Thanks to a commenter, I found a paper by Peter Carruthers.
metacognition always results from people turning their mindreading abilities upon themselves.
By metacognition he means our description of our own mental processes. We call this introspection, although his theory makes introspection something of a misnomer.
He points out that what I call the “outside-in” view of Theory of Mind implies that autistics should have weak introspection. He argues that studies are consistent with this, or at least not terribly inconsistent with it.
I believe that there are a lot of studies showing that people will clearly make up explanations for what they do. An experimenter will do something to move subjects’ hands, and the subjects will “explain” that they were reaching for something. I think of this is evidence for the “outside-in” view.
The “outside-in” view reminds me of the old joke about behaviorists greeting each other by saying “You’re fine, how am I?”
It’s all quite complicated because people obviously do have access to their own memories and thoughts and know, for example, which temptations they avoided and which actions they considered and rejected while they can only guess about these things with others. Which leads to the ‘fundamental attribution error’ (explaining one’s own behavior in terms of circumstances and others’ behavior in terms of fixed character). BUT, people are status conscious social animals and one of the mind’s important social functions is to serve as a PR-flack seeking to enhance status and justify actions. And the easiest, most effective way to deceive others is to begin by deceiving yourself.
I’m kind of fascinated how most of us always feel like ourselves. There must be a lot of self-deception in order to just have a self, let alone maintain a self-image, or a persona.
More than a lot.
Think of how many webs a spider spins, or as many dams as a beaver builds. We tell stories.
“And just as spiders don’t have to think, consciously and deliberately, about how to spin their webs, and just as beavers, unlike professional human engineers, do not consciously and deliberately plan the structures they build, we (unlike professional human storytellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them. Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.” Daniel Dennett
PR is exactly how Ernest Gellner explained it: “Our conscious mind seems to be rather like the public relations department of a large, complex and turbulent firm, dominated by a secretive and divided management, which never allows the PR officer to be privy to its secrets. Public Relations content themselves with issuing idealised and simplified accounts of the situation for external consumption, and these bear little relation to the real state of affairs within the corporation, and have little influence on it.”
“…which never allows the PR officer to be privy to its secrets. ”
But this is far too strong. Many people go through their lives with secrets that few ever suspect. Closeted gays, for example, were not self-deceived. They were perfectly aware of what they were hiding.
This is Michael Frayn playing with the idea of the sovereign self: “I am a mere constitutional fiction, a face on the postage stamps, a signature at the bottom of decrees written by unidentified powers behind the throne over which I have no control. I am manipulated by competing factions about whose divisions and debates I am kept ignorant. Even my private entertainments are devised for me by invisible courtiers working in parts of the palace that I have never entered, and could never find my way to. (And where did the idea for this inquiry come from? What dark purpose—and whose—was it intended to serve?) All I can ever know about this world behind my back is its product—the words I utter on its behalf, the mysterious masques I find myself watching.”
And this is Ludwig Wittgenstein: “You sometimes see in a wind a piece of paper blowing about anyhow. Suppose the piece of paper could make the decision: ‘Now I want to go this way.’ I say: ‘Queer, this paper always decides where it is to go, and all the time it is the wind that blows it. I know it is the wind that blows it.’ That same force which moves it also in a different way moves its decisions.”
Your conscious brain is the piece of paper, but the rest of your brain is the wind that blows it. Or the rest of your brain is the entire British monarchy, footmen and all. And this is true. It’s a half second difference, but it’s there.
I would not be able to express how terrified I was during the Obama administration and as Hillary grew towards a fait accompli. These people have nearly perfected the progressive version of the con game where a reasonable view of climate or race is seen as fascism. Refusing to remove whites from a campus is racism, etc. Luckily, there was a reaction. Sure, it is hyperbolic n its own way, but history hasn’t ended yet.