Worker: “Yes! It’s called ‘motivated cognition’ for a reason. Your brain runs something like a utility-maximization algorithm to tell when and how you should deceive yourself. It’s epistemically correct to take the intentional stance towards this process.”
Carl: “But I don’t have any control over this process!”
Worker: “Not consciously, no. But you can notice the situation you’re in, think about what pressures there are on you to self-deceive, and think about modifying your situation to reduce these pressures. And you can do this to other people, too.”
Disagree that it’s either conscious or unconscious. I think, there’s a scale, and clearly most things in the brain are unavailable to introspection, but there’s a large number of things in my awareness that are merely cognitively expensive to check in on (I.e. my working memory is pretty full, so the subprocess is on the edge of my ability to notice it).
This all seems right. I have found introspection techniques such as meditation pretty useful for noticing how my mind works, though even with introspection the picture is really incomplete.
Disagree that it’s either conscious or unconscious. I think, there’s a scale, and clearly most things in the brain are unavailable to introspection, but there’s a large number of things in my awareness that are merely cognitively expensive to check in on (I.e. my working memory is pretty full, so the subprocess is on the edge of my ability to notice it).
This all seems right. I have found introspection techniques such as meditation pretty useful for noticing how my mind works, though even with introspection the picture is really incomplete.