Making Sense - Sam Harris - #268 — The Limits of Self-Knowledge

Steven fleming is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, and the author of the recent book, "Know thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness and Self-awareness." In this conversation, we talk about the relevant neuroscience, the relationship between self-knowledge and intelligence, the evolution of metacognition, error monitoring theory of mind, mirror neurons, deception and self-deception, false confidence, probabilistic reasoning, cognitive decline, and other topics related to the topic of self-awareness. To access a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/Making Sense. To learn more about the Making Sense Podcast, please go to makingsense.org/podcasts/the-making-sense-podcast. This podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, and therefore it s made possible by the support and contributions of our listeners. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. We don t run ads on the podcast, but you can become a supporter by becoming one of our super-savant fellow members, and you'll get access to all sorts of awesome resources including books, courses, podcasts, and courses, including the latest ones we discuss in the making sense podcast. You'll get a chance to access full episodes of the Making sense Podcast wherever you get your chance to listen to the podcast. Thanks for listening to this podcast! - Sam Harris Make sense? This is a podcast by Sam Harris -- not an ad? -- is the podcast that makes you better than you get to know what you're listening to? -- is it possible to be better than that? -- not even you can be helped to know that you're making sense? -- you'll need to be helped by that you can do that by listening to it? -- can you become a good thing? -- it's made possible to help you? -- yes, you'll become a friend? -- and so much of that's a good idea? -- so you'll even get a sense of that too you'll have a good chance to learn about the podcast? -- let me say that you'll also get that too of that in that's not better of that, right you'll hear about it, too you're not even that's right, right of you, so you're gonna get that?

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

00:00:12.780 this you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part

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00:00:32.760 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy

00:00:36.780 what we're doing here please consider becoming one today i'm speaking with steven fleming steven is a

00:00:51.260 professor of cognitive neuroscience at university college london and is the author of the recent

00:00:56.380 book know thyself the science of self-awareness and self-awareness is the topic of today's

00:01:02.960 conversation we talk about the relevant neuroscience the relationship between self-knowledge and

00:01:09.220 intelligence the evolution of metacognition error monitoring theory of mind mirror neurons deception

00:01:18.660 and self-deception false confidence probabilistic reasoning where metacognition fails cognitive decline

00:01:28.300 those places where self-knowledge might be counterproductive and other topics anyway i found it quite

00:01:36.320 interesting and i hope you do as well and now i bring you steven fleming

00:01:41.500 i am here with steven fleming steve thanks for joining me thanks very much sam it's an honor to

00:01:53.580 be here so you've written a very interesting book on perhaps the most interesting topic the topic is

00:02:01.420 self-knowledge self-awareness the book is know thyself the science of self-awareness but i'm really

00:02:08.920 eager to talk about the whole sweep of this but um before we jump in perhaps you can summarize your

00:02:15.900 background academically and intellectually sure yeah so i'm currently a professor of cognitive

00:02:22.500 neuroscience at university college london and i guess i mean i've always been interested in the

00:02:29.480 sciences um i left high school without really knowing what i wanted to do wanted to be a musician so

00:02:36.320 i didn't apply to university like all my friends were doing and instead i took a a year off back

00:02:41.860 then and worked in an office job and it was while i was commuting that i started reading popular science

00:02:47.100 books on cognitive science that's partly why i was also so interested in writing one myself when i got

00:02:53.100 the opportunity and interesting just found it absolutely fascinating i had like no idea that there

00:02:58.560 was a science of the mind out there we didn't get exposed to that at school at high school so i then

00:03:04.020 became fixated on doing experimental psychology i went to oxford and i was lucky there to have

00:03:10.340 as a tutor a guy called paul as a party who works on blindsight this bizarre neurological condition of

00:03:18.640 consciousness and it was paul who convinced me that there was a real rigorous science out there of

00:03:23.800 consciousness and it was possible to do you know good neuroscience on this and i then went on to

00:03:30.260 university college london to do a phd in neuroscience with and that was co-supervised with the psychologist

00:03:35.720 chris frith and the neuroscientist ray dolan and both great people i haven't met either but i've

00:03:44.040 obviously read their papers yeah no it was uh it was a fascinating time and in ray's lab he was focused

00:03:50.340 on um studying decision making using reinforcement learning models and in my phd i mostly focused on using

00:03:58.140 brain imaging to study decision making but on the side i was continuing to kind of have this

00:04:03.700 off on love affair with consciousness which has kind of continued with me now and i i guess towards the

00:04:11.300 end of my phd i realized we could start applying some of the tools of decision making research to also

00:04:16.780 study how we make second order decisions so how we think about and reflect on how we're performing on

00:04:23.560 various tasks and that's what psychologists refer to as metacognition or thinking about thinking

00:04:28.840 and but at the time there there was a you know a long tradition in psychology of studying this

00:04:35.420 this topic but very few people were working on the neuroscience of metacognition

00:04:38.980 and i had the opportunity in a sense to get in on the ground floor of that and we ran a couple of

00:04:45.400 early brain imaging studies looking at the relationship between prefrontal function and metacognition

00:04:50.900 i then went off to new york to do a postdoc at myu to build computer learn how to build computational

00:04:57.120 models of metacognition and then in 2015 moved back to to london and ucl where i now lead my own

00:05:05.300 research group studying metacognition and consciousness nice nice well um we should dispense

00:05:12.640 with one possible source of confusion at the outset because i'm not sure how familiar you are with with my

00:05:19.680 work especially on the topic of mindfulness meditation the nature of the self and so i'm

00:05:26.600 someone who's given to say at fairly regular intervals that the self is an illusion or at best a

00:05:34.800 construct you know at bottom it's not what it seems but that's a very specific use of the word

00:05:41.940 self and when we talk about self-awareness i think we're talking about something that is

00:05:47.520 far more capacious than the the sense of subject object perception which is really the the linchpin

00:05:54.980 of what of the self that i would argue that mindfulness ultimately reveals to be illusory

00:06:00.120 so i mean we're talking about the whole person much more often than we're talking about the sense that

00:06:07.280 there's a subject in the head independent of experience so when we're talking about self-awareness

00:06:12.820 there's you know this this is not in violation of anything i have said about the status of of the

00:06:18.760 the self as subject and in other contexts and i'm happy to talk about the self with you as well but

00:06:24.620 i just wanted to try to clarify that for people because there's going to be something i can hear in the in

00:06:30.420 the heads of many listeners if the self is an illusion what could we possibly mean by self-awareness well

00:06:36.180 self-awareness extends to everything else we can reflect on and be aware of in a kind of second

00:06:45.500 order way that relates to our experience you know our performance errors the thing that we just

00:06:50.660 experienced a moment ago you know lapses in memory or i mean let's just let's just dive into the topic

00:06:57.840 how do you describe metacognition at this point yeah no i think that's a really useful background to

00:07:04.100 have in place a because i am talking about something distinct here to the philosophical notion of

00:07:11.300 self which is a complex object and here i'm talking about something more practical something more

00:07:18.540 functional which is this capacity to be aware of our traits our skills our personalities our behaviors

00:07:26.900 and in some sense see ourselves like others see us and we can study this in various ways we can

00:07:34.980 look at in very simple tasks how people realize they've made errors or how they're able to estimate

00:07:40.100 their confidence in their skills and abilities and so on and it's something that we often i think just

00:07:45.940 take for granted but the reason i find it so fascinating is because when you think about it for a moment it is a

00:07:51.360 kind of bizarre and wonderful feature of the human mind that we can some in some sense think about how

00:07:56.980 our own minds are working and this has very practical consequences so you the reason we write a shopping

00:08:04.860 list when we go shopping is because in some sense we realize that our memory is not going to be good

00:08:09.160 enough to hold all those items in mind and similarly when we start to realize our sight is failing for

00:08:16.660 instance it's not because we think the outside world has become blurry it's because we realize that

00:08:21.360 there's something in our perceptual systems that it needs fixing with new glasses and so on so

00:08:26.660 it's this kind of practical reflective thought that's not always obvious from the outside but it's

00:08:31.580 something that we can study with the tools of psychological science yeah yeah and one thing is increasingly

00:08:38.520 clear is that other people and now even algorithms can know what we're like better than than we can

00:08:49.740 certainly on specific topics as i remember a friend once told me a a story from a board meeting where he

00:08:58.080 was uh he was engaged in a very stressful conversation with the group and someone in the meeting commented on how

00:09:06.680 emotional he was getting and and you know just seemed like they might want to take a break and and he denied

00:09:12.400 being overly emotional and and someone at around the table suggested that he bring his attention

00:09:20.160 to the sensations at his upper lip and the moment he did that he burst into tears wow i mean apparently

00:09:29.140 his lip had been quivering as though he were about to he was about to burst into tears and it was noticeable to

00:09:34.880 to those in the room and you know you can imagine just how much can be known about any one of us

00:09:43.560 now based on our google search history say or you know anything we do with our attention online and when

00:09:51.220 you look at the database of knowledge that is the profile of each of us that is accruing in somewhere in the

00:09:58.040 cloud and what might be gleaned from that when you compare it to everything else you know every other

00:10:04.660 profile of every other person you know just the statistical knowledge there and the capacity to

00:10:11.260 predict the next thing we'll find captivating yeah it is exactly what you said to take the view of

00:10:18.180 oneself that another person could have opens the door to you know sometimes mortifying you know at minimum

00:10:26.800 interesting facts that are not necessarily visible or salient when one's simply living one's life and

00:10:36.080 having one's experience yeah absolutely it's interesting the example you mentioned of the

00:10:40.640 person in the boardroom because i i feel like i have through studying metacognition i've become

00:10:45.860 more attuned in my own life to how i might have this fading out of self-awareness at certain moments and

00:10:54.420 it's something that my wife has said to me on occasion when things are stressful with grant

00:11:00.260 applications or whatever that i just become you know a horrible person to live with on a for a few

00:11:06.060 days at a time and i used to deny this completely i was like i don't feel like anything's changing my

00:11:10.340 behavior and i now come to realize that how could i have possibly known at that time i mean there's a

00:11:16.580 whole interesting story there about stress and how it is detrimental for metacognition itself so you

00:11:23.040 have this kind of paradoxical situation where the times when you might need to be aware of how your

00:11:29.080 behavior is becoming uh causing problems for others those are the times when metacognition and

00:11:35.760 self-awareness might actually be most impaired um but i have definitely i think become a bit more

00:11:41.060 willing to accept in my own life that those fade outs of self-awareness can happen and they do

00:11:48.620 happen probably more often than i'd like to admit and i then have this stronger tendency to trust what

00:11:55.380 say my wife is saying about my behavior and to try and correct it accordingly yeah yeah so let's um

00:12:02.720 build up this picture of metacognition i mean the the simplest or most common definition i think one

00:12:10.260 encounters is the phrase knowing that you know right there's the knowing of things there's the cognition

00:12:16.960 piece and then there's the self-awareness that you have the knowledge and this extends to

00:12:23.620 knowledge in all of its forms you know semantic knowledge if you ask me could you name more than four

00:12:31.660 states in the united states i could say yes to that i could be sure about my knowledge there without

00:12:39.520 actually going through the exercise of listing any states uh so i have this more abstract understanding

00:12:47.360 that you know my knowledge bank contains at least you know four state names and so it is with so much

00:12:54.520 of what we know and of course we can be wrong about that we can actually think we could uh produce

00:13:00.400 specific concepts or memories and when asked actually fail but generally speaking there's um

00:13:09.520 there's a representation of what uh is in our storehouse of knowledge that doesn't require us

00:13:15.380 to actually go into the storehouse in order to cash it out in that moment and so it is with you know

00:13:21.180 even procedural learning or you know motor memory so again do you know how to ride a bike you know

00:13:27.520 could you raise your hands over your head we'd be surprised to have our confidence about that

00:13:33.320 disconfirmed uh if we tried but it's um how would you build up the layers of what we're calling

00:13:40.240 metacognition here what what is it beyond this representation to oneself that one knows certain

00:13:47.840 things yeah i i think that's um a very nice way of thinking about it this this notion that there are

00:13:54.020 representations that go beyond knowledge and one analogy that i sometimes use it's not a perfect one

00:14:00.440 because it's not how things actually work but you can think of metacognition as in some sense being

00:14:06.020 like the index of a book and the index usually points you to the right page in the book but if

00:14:10.720 the index maker has got things wrong and the book's self-knowledge has in some sense failed then

00:14:16.540 sometimes there will be an index entry that does not correspond to the the actual text in the book and

00:14:25.580 i think we can you know start to build up a picture of how metacognition works by thinking of the brain as

00:14:35.340 effectively a hierarchical system and that it does not only encode information in memory it does not

00:14:44.320 only perceive and you know represent things at a first order level but it also has what we think of as

00:14:52.260 higher order representations and we think parts of association cortex like prefrontal and parietal

00:14:58.600 cortex are important for this that they it builds representations at a more abstract level of how the

00:15:04.640 system is working and i think that's you know that's probably the best way of conceptualizing

00:15:09.780 metacognition at a cognitive systems level uh that we have at the moment and then we can obviously

00:15:15.260 take this in many different directions in terms of specific topics within that

00:15:19.420 broader umbrella term of metacognition and how does it interact if it interacts at all with the

00:15:26.740 variable of intelligence so there's i think the there is an initial intuition that we have that

00:15:35.600 intelligence is in some sense allied with having good awareness of what we know and don't know but

00:15:44.660 as ever it turns on our definition of intelligence and empirically what we've found perhaps surprisingly

00:15:52.700 in many of our studies is that when we measure metacognition in the lab and maybe it's useful

00:15:58.940 to say a few words about how how we actually do that so typically the way we can quantify your

00:16:05.960 metacognition and put a number on it in a particular task is by asking you to assess your performance on a

00:16:12.760 number of trials so of the task so we might give you a memory task and after every decision about

00:16:19.540 whether this object was on the list that you're asked to remember or not we'd ask you how confident

00:16:24.220 you were about that choice or we might give you a task involving perceptual judgments and then ask

00:16:30.900 you how confident you are about each choice and the key thing we're interested in there is not only

00:16:35.760 your performance on the memory and the perception task but also how your confidence tracks your

00:16:41.200 performance so intuitively if i have high confidence when i'm right and lower confidence when i'm wrong

00:16:46.700 that's what we call having good metacognitive sensitivity or metacognitive ability and what

00:16:53.540 we found in those studies now we've done studies of thousands of people is that performance on classical

00:16:59.920 iq tests is not a great predictor of metacognitive ability and this lines up with some other work

00:17:08.400 in um using other measures of metacognition like whether we tend to be fooled for um by initially

00:17:17.000 intuitive answers without reflecting on them so these are things like the cognitive reflection test

00:17:21.160 that taps into more system two than system one thinking and again there in the literature on that kind of

00:17:28.460 test it does seem to be independent of classical iq measures and i think one way of thinking about this

00:17:34.960 on a very broad brush basis is that the kind of neural and cognitive resources that we bring to

00:17:41.520 the table to solve reasoning problems which is effectively what an iq test is tapping into

00:17:47.120 is uh that those are distinct to or somewhat distinct to the kinds of neural and cognitive resources involved

00:17:54.340 in reflecting on our performance in those tasks including potentially even in an iq test so you in theory

00:18:00.740 and we have done a little bit of this you can measure someone's metacognition about their

00:18:05.500 performance on a test of intelligence so in a sense both on a theoretical basis but also also on an

00:18:12.240 empirical basis we think metacognition and iq come apart in interesting ways yeah you can you can see

00:18:19.640 that metacognition and performance have to break apart because you would have perfect metacognition

00:18:28.240 if you were confident that you had utterly failed to perform if in fact you had utterly failed to

00:18:36.300 perform you could just go through life failing again and again and and as long as you're aware

00:18:41.060 that it's just one failure after another well then your your metacognition score is perfect

00:18:45.820 that's that's right that's exactly right so and i say i kind of make the throwaway line in the book

00:18:52.500 that metacognition is often most useful when we're doing stupid things because that's when

00:18:56.280 you know we need to be aware of making errors so no that's absolutely right what picture do we have

00:19:02.000 based on evolutionary psychology of metacognition how do we think this might have evolved and and we

00:19:10.400 know what are the benefits of being able to represent to oneself the likelihood that one has made an error

00:19:17.760 or i mean that's obviously only one slice of metacognition but this second order reflection

00:19:24.660 what how does this fit in in the context of evolutionary psychology so one starting point

00:19:30.320 for getting at that question is to look at how and whether we share metacognitive capacities

00:19:36.500 with other species and there has been an interesting line of work for many years in

00:19:42.760 comparative psychology looking at tests of confidence and uncertainty and error monitoring

00:19:48.700 in animals and the general picture there is that in many species you can have pretty sophisticated

00:19:55.060 tracking of confidence tracking of errors and so on so there's been some lovely work in dolphins and

00:20:01.660 monkeys and rats showing that they pass confidence tasks similar to the ones that we use with humans

00:20:07.760 but that i think is a um is a type of metacognition that occupies a different space to explicit self

00:20:18.360 awareness in humans and the reason that we think that's the case is because when we look at child

00:20:24.640 development in humans that kind of implicit metacognition the ability to track confidence and monitor errors

00:20:32.760 that seems to be in place relatively early in life so there's been some beautiful and heroic studies done

00:20:38.440 by sig kuida's lab in paris showing that babies as young as 12 months i think even younger than that in some

00:20:46.200 of their studies show signatures of error monitoring both in eeg activity and also in their persistence for

00:20:54.800 searching for particular objects so when you use their persistence of searching for a toy for instance as a marker of

00:21:02.440 confidence then you get all the same metrics of metacognitive sensitivity that you can get out of the

00:21:07.020 the the adult data now that seems to be that kind of lower level ability to self-monitor seems to be in place

00:21:15.440 quite early in life in humans but when you actually when kids become verbal and you then ask them about their

00:21:22.620 confidence and about whether they know something or don't know something then as i'm discovering at the moment

00:21:28.640 with my two and a half year old their metacognition is terrible they think they know things they don't

00:21:33.840 know they fail to you know realize they need to ask you about something and so on so it's not until the

00:21:41.000 age of around three or four that children start to gain this explicit self-awareness of what they know

00:21:48.560 and don't know and we think that in studies in adult humans that kind of more explicit level of

00:21:56.100 self-awareness is related more to theory of mind or the ability to think about other people as well as

00:22:02.220 to think about ourselves so i'm not sure if that answered your question but hopefully it got us started

00:22:05.840 along that line yeah well that does um neatly differentiate us from other animals even other

00:22:13.040 primates when you um imagine that the that an awareness a comprehensive awareness of our own

00:22:20.420 mind is of a piece with with what we call theory of mind it goes by other names like mind reading and

00:22:29.360 mind sight and but it's the ability to represent the mental states of others such that you can recognize

00:22:36.140 that other people can have rather often different beliefs and desires and expectations than you do

00:22:44.460 and they and they can be at odds with what is in fact true of the world as obviously the famous test of

00:22:50.000 this is to set up a little playhouse with some dolls and and ask kids around the age of four

00:22:57.440 one doll leaves the room and then another doll hides a cherished object somewhere in the playhouse and

00:23:05.000 uh then you ask the kid you know where when this when this other figure comes back where is he or

00:23:11.000 she going to look for the the object it's only once they can develop the concept of another person

00:23:17.800 holding a false belief that they can give the correct answer which is he's going to believe it

00:23:22.960 was where he where it last was before he left the room so yeah i mean remind me i i think we

00:23:30.900 while there's some possible basis for a very rudimentary theory of mind in other primates i mean i think

00:23:39.700 there's some something like deception it's not the it's still somewhat controversial to call it

00:23:47.200 deception right i think we still don't think that other primates have a proper theory of mind is that

00:23:53.520 correct yeah that i mean it's an evolving field and in fact only in the past two or three years

00:23:59.600 um have there been studies suggesting that chimpanzees can represent false beliefs at least

00:24:05.960 to the extent of being able to shift their gaze towards where the object is actually going to be

00:24:13.140 sorry where to where the object will they think the object will appear from the perspective of the

00:24:19.220 other person but so far at least and i was reading a review on this recently from laurie santos and

00:24:25.280 colleagues and so far at least the picture is that even though if you use clever experimental

00:24:31.180 techniques you could get some hint that they can track false beliefs at least but in behavior in the

00:24:36.960 in in terms of being able to act upon those and use those to guide behavior it seems like there is a

00:24:42.940 gulf there from the best experiments on chimps to humans there's quite a gulf and this is not human 0.97

00:24:49.420 adults this is as you say kids age around four and what's really interesting there is that if you go

00:24:55.580 back that field of research that field on animal theory of mind was kicked off by this famous paper

00:25:02.000 back in the 70s which just had the title of does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind and going back

00:25:08.960 to that paper you what what the authors of that paper meant by theory of mind was the ability to think

00:25:15.780 about other people's mental states but also the ability to think about your own mental state

00:25:20.040 that term theory of mind has kind of got used most often in the literature to be about other people

00:25:26.640 yeah what's interesting now i think with this rise of work on metacognition is that we're starting to

00:25:30.840 think okay maybe this is just a more general computational capacity that subserves not only

00:25:36.420 thinking about other people but also thinking about ourselves yeah this is this is really interesting

00:25:41.500 and this is this is a place where it does at least make a point of contact with the self that i

00:25:50.060 often denigrate as illusory and there's this sense that our sense of our our representation of

00:25:56.860 ourselves in social space and in the world is of a piece with our concrete representation of others

00:26:04.500 as others right that this really indelible sense of self and other emerges together kind of a single

00:26:12.500 cognitive brushstroke and when you as many people can attest in you know experiences in meditation and

00:26:21.640 you know with psychedelics when that boundary between self and other erodes it you know it erodes

00:26:27.540 again it's kind of a single boundary where you're if you're not really reifying self you're not

00:26:35.220 quite reifying other in quite the same way in the normal course of events where we we feel like

00:26:41.460 ourselves and surrounded by other minds it does seem intuitive to me that we're doing something quite

00:26:48.720 similar when we're representing other minds and and reflecting on our own i mean it's just what we're

00:26:54.680 thinking about the same kinds of things and it's the angle of our gaze that is different but it's

00:27:02.920 it's in this goes to many other results in neuroscience when you think of you know the mirror neuron

00:27:09.700 research and just how is it that we interpret the behaviors of others when you you see someone

00:27:14.820 reaching for an object you have you understand their intention in a way that maps on to you know

00:27:20.760 what it's like to be you doing more or less the same thing reaching for objects of of that kind

00:27:25.840 there's a kind of mirroring component here in the way we um we understand other people's behaviors and

00:27:31.940 it is the research thus far you know i think it's appropriate to be somewhat skeptical of just how much

00:27:38.100 has been made of the mirror neuron research but it certainly seems that there is a kind of self

00:27:43.560 mapping uh that is the basis for our understanding the behavior of others yeah i i think there's

00:27:49.160 there seems to be a lot of circumstantial evidence surrounding that linkage it's really hard to

00:27:56.160 pin it down um and what i find fascinating and somewhat frustrating is you know can we cash that

00:28:03.780 out in a more computational terms like what is that system really actually doing assuming it is a

00:28:09.600 system that is as you say building a model of someone else and also building a model of ourselves

00:28:14.800 but it does seem like that similar brain networks are involved and we recently did a meta-analysis of

00:28:21.880 all the studies of brain imaging studies of metacognition and compared that to classical theory of mind

00:28:29.300 networks and there there was interesting overlap in regions of the medial prefrontal cortex

00:28:34.960 and we know for instance in neurodegenerative diseases like dementia decline in self-awareness is

00:28:42.420 often accompanied by a decline in social cognition as well and developmentally they seem to go hand

00:28:48.360 in hand in children so there's a lot of kind of there does seem to be a symmetry there and i'm

00:28:54.000 attracted to that symmetry i just think it's hard to find a good way and we are thinking of trying to

00:28:59.640 do this but it's hard to find a good way of directly comparing the kind of computations that might

00:29:05.180 underpin self and other evaluations yes we've just discussed that theory of mind is the the necessary

00:29:12.720 precursor for deception because it's not until you understand that other people have beliefs and

00:29:20.020 representations uh that you can then manipulate those beliefs and representations strategically

00:29:26.180 with an awareness of uh that this is a likely way to produce a desired effect in their behavior

00:29:32.900 but then there's this question of self-deception which um again is a somewhat controversial topic

00:29:40.020 scientifically it's there are paradoxes that await us when we try to think of self-deception as

00:29:46.340 being truly analogous to the deception of others because then you're left with this quasi freudian

00:29:52.460 picture of part of you consciously deceiving some other part of you so that the part of you that is

00:29:57.740 in the deception business must know the truth in order to strategically hide it or or or distort it

00:30:03.980 uh for the rest of you how do you think of self-deception or the the phenomenology of being

00:30:11.580 you know flagrantly wrong about one's inner life or outer behavior in ways that um invite this this analogy

00:30:20.620 to deception you know we do often summarize it as self-deception or you know willful ignorance i mean the

00:30:27.280 willful part of it is perverse uh and you know inscrutable from a cognitive point of view

00:30:34.200 um where does that fit into the discussion of metacognition yeah it's it's interesting in terms

00:30:41.040 of how that might connect to this notion of belief decoupling from accuracy or confidence decoupling from

00:30:50.260 performance because i think that is something we do see routinely in many studies people's metacognition

00:30:56.220 isn't very good they are sometimes confident that they've got the right answer even though it's

00:31:01.600 clearly wrong and we know that there are all these biases in belief and confidence that people like

00:31:08.400 daniel kahneman have famously documented i think that one place it connects there to the discussion we

00:31:17.960 were just having on theory of mind is that we model or we create narratives to explain the behavior of

00:31:26.080 others that's part of the the the depth of mental state inference that we can do that we can say well

00:31:33.260 they must have ignored me in the street because of you know what i did yesterday or something like

00:31:39.520 that there's a kind of like a narrative that we create about the thought processes going on in

00:31:44.100 other people's heads and we seem to create a similar self-narrative and that can cohere more or less

00:31:53.840 with reality and when it decouples completely then we're in the realm of psychosis or confabulation

00:31:59.340 so i think that there are you know we can start building up a story about why beliefs or narratives

00:32:06.420 might decouple from what is the ground truth of our behavior or how we appear to others what i think

00:32:13.320 is really interesting about your your question is that i hadn't really thought about before is that

00:32:17.740 does that then in some sense require a system to also know the truth internally and it's not clear to

00:32:26.620 me that that is the case although i think there could it could be possible that that is the case in some

00:32:31.640 circumstances so we've done a bit of work this was work led by a former postdoc of mine dan bang

00:32:38.020 who has been really interested in this problem he calls private public mapping which is effectively

00:32:45.280 how do we take our private beliefs and convert them into what we say to others and so his example

00:32:52.200 of this is you know what do you say to a kindly aunt who's given you a terrible christmas present and

00:32:57.620 you know you don't want to hurt their feelings so you say an untruth but you you do this strategically

00:33:03.140 and we studied that in the context of metacognition by being able to track using brain imaging the

00:33:09.860 confidence that was being formed at any given moment because we have a fairly good understanding now of

00:33:15.140 the neural correlates of confidence in individual decisions but then we required subjects to

00:33:21.640 strategically adjust the confidence they communicated to their partners in a collaborative

00:33:27.480 game and what we found was that there was a distinct there were distinct networks involved in this

00:33:33.760 private sense of confidence how do i feel about my performance now and another part of the prefrontal

00:33:39.520 cortex was engaged when they had to strategically adjust that to communicate to the other person so

00:33:45.660 that would be it's not quite deception but it's some kind of strategic mapping between um you know this

00:33:53.060 kind of private feeling of of what's going on and what we're trying to communicate to others for the

00:33:59.140 purposes of strategic manipulation um so it'd be super interesting to know whether we're at some level

00:34:05.460 doing that to ourselves that at some sense that same general circuit for strategic manipulation of

00:34:11.660 others is also working under the hood for ourselves and i don't know of any work on that yeah well

00:34:17.440 when you look at the structure of much of our thought it is conversational i mean we are talking to

00:34:23.180 ourselves much of the time as though there's someone in us who is listening right who needs to be told

00:34:30.940 certain things otherwise you know much of our discursive thought is totally superfluous right you know

00:34:36.460 i mean why do you why does part of you say anything to the rest of you as though the rest of you isn't

00:34:43.420 aware of the thing that's being said you know if you like if i'm looking for an object and on my desk

00:34:48.740 and i said you know i when i spot it i might say oh there it is right to myself you know silently with

00:34:55.840 the voice of the mind but if i'm the one to see it right why who am i telling oh there it is right i mean

00:35:02.820 who who needs that further linguistic information when i i the one who is in possession of the eyes that have

00:35:10.700 seen it are you know is looking at it in that moment and so so much of our thought is dialogical

00:35:16.780 uh that one could imagine a similar process is happening we know we're the thoughts are tumbling

00:35:22.660 out our mouths when we're speaking to others and then when we shut our mouths we keep talking to

00:35:28.440 ourselves about more or less everything yeah and i'm i'm very attracted to the position that

00:35:35.940 chris frith holds on this that in a sense and this comes back to the conversation about an

00:35:41.480 evolutionary story of metacognition that why did we start building this this self-narrative

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - November 24, 2021

#268 — The Limits of Self-Knowledge

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