Taking the magic out of self-deception

Note: When I say “the mind” I mean the whole thing and when I say “consciousness” I mean our gaze inside our minds, sorry I don’t have enough space to elaborate on the distinction. And when I say model of the mind I mean a model of how our mind works with respect to what's visible and what's not and who/what is calling the shots, not anything deeper/broader.

The solution to many problems is hidden within the question being asked. Self-deception occurs when one (appears to?) lie(s) to oneself. We can formulate the question at hand as follows: how can our mind deceive itself? How can the one who is being lied to also know that she is being lied to, precisely because she is the one doing the lying?

(for a more complex formulation of the paradox(es) of self-deception I wrote a paper on this a couple of years ago which is why I'm thinking about it)

I think Freud was right to think that the mind that is “lying” and the mind that is being lied to are not exactly the same thing. He built a model based on the separation of selves. Think about it like a small opaque circle (the unconscious mind) inside a larger transparent circle (the transparent area being what's accessible to our conscious mind).

(this is veeeery simplified but it's all we need; for more, Wikipedia)

For Freud, self-deception occurs when the unconscious mind deceives the conscious mind. Unfortunately, Freud's underlying model of the mind has a lot of problems, especially the fact that the unconscious mind seems to have unexplained, scientifically ungrounded "magical" properties.* This is why his model of self-deception is somewhat convincing yet flawed.

Sartre has a different model: for him, the mind is translucent. This means there is only one consciousness, but its "field of vision" is limited. Think about a map (the whole field) and a smaller magnifying glass (the narrow field of vision of the consciousness) that can move around to show whatever area it wants to on the map.

(Sartre's model is explained and analyzed in detail in the paper I already linked above... I swear I'm not selling anything)

Sartre's underlying model of the mind is plausible, but from within this model he needs to complicate things a lot to make it  work (“It” being the explanation of self-deception within his model of the mind). It seems that the problem doesn’t require as much complexity as he uses. The main issue with Sartre’s approach is that the mind must also somehow hide from itself the motives and decisions related to its own deception while theoretically being able to “see everything.”

I think we should use a model of the mind that takes into account what we know about ourselves and how and why our minds function. It doesn't need to be fully explained, just more plausible and less mystical or optimistic than Freud's or Sartre's models. Obviously, it’s not very fair to attack Freud and Sartre for things they couldn’t have known, but I’m using them because I think their theories constitute great points of departure for us given how hard they worked hard on the problem with what they had.

Here are some remarks on how we can build a hypothetical model of the mind that might help us understand self-deception better:

1. There is no clear boundary between our mind and our body. Descartes and Christianity (I can't speak about other religions because I don't know them very well) have gotten us used to thinking about our mind as a completely separate entity that understands its own articulable motives and drives. However, a lot of the things that drive us to make decisions probably don't even make any sense at the level of language, they are better understood as chemical processes. In that sense, when we refer to unconscious processes these processes are not conscious for someone or something other than ourselves: they are just unconscious.

2. It follows that, in order to understand ourselves, a lot of what we do is look at our feelings and reverse engineer their underlying desires, thoughts, etc. We bring these semi-hypothetical underlying thoughts into the realm of language without ever confirming them. In that sense, the boundary between knowledge and interpretation is shifting too.
3. There are evolutionary reasons why we would have a tendency to want to believe things that make us happy - think about it from the "perspective" of a mental process that focuses on some basic heuristics like avoiding pain. We could have one interpretation of things (e.g., “I only stole the $20 bill because he was stupid for leaving it”) that ends up being favored and less questioned because one of the basic processes controlling where consciousness looks seeks to avoid pain.
4. Following from 3, self-deception would be less of a conscious decision and more of a mind-steering-us-towards-comfort thing. Kind of the same process that makes us forget embarrassing moments - an even better analogy is, in Harry Potter, the spell that makes Muggles remember appointments or things they have forgotten so they leave when they get too close to the Quidditch stadium.

With these remarks in mind - and much more research - we can start to build a theory of self-deception (I would be in favor of calling it self-deceptions because I suspect that we group multiple different phenomena under that name) that is somewhere in between Sartre and Freud and much more in line with both current scientific knowledge, of which I apologize to the reader for not having more, and common sense.




*: Although I think Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind is deeply flawed, I think psychoanalysis can bring a lot to the table. Maybe I’ll write a post about it soon.