Brain Fiction (5)

Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation

The brain is capable of employing a wide range of checking procedures. This is to ensure that the owner of the brain can act intelligently with the environment and survive.

Hirstein lists the following checking procedures that the brain is capable of:

  • Checking against one’s autobiographical memory, factual knowledge, body representation, and internal contradictions. Checking the correctness of the current visual images.
  • Checking of the effect that current thoughts might have on another person and observing the other person (mind-reading). This also includes checking the consequences and reward value of the current thoughts.
  • Evaluating the level of confidence a person has in these thoughts and developing intentions to act on them

 

Confabulation may result from a failure of one/some of these domains.

Religious people may admit that their belief in God might be ill-grounded but nevertheless hold true to their belief because that’s exactly the function of faith. Confabulation occurs if they have a strong tendency to rely on ill-grounded claims.

Religious leaders may even engage in fantastic confabulation, like: The End of World is near, Jesus is coming back at a specific time, all people outside their community are damned, modern technology is satanic, and the like. They would preach this with great confidence and thus manipulate their audience (that is not allowed to employ proper checking procedures and may have lost this ability altogether).

Confabulators have a low threshold for accepting thoughts as true beliefs and therefore believe what they should doubt.

A self-deceived person has a greater ability to access information that should allow them to check if their belief is ill-grounded – but they do not employ this --- whereas a (clinical) confabulator lacks the ability to do so.

Self-deception is a form of self-induced weakness of the warrant (Daniel Dennett)

One way to protect certain beliefs is to never think them through and check all the ramifications. People might say: ‘Don’t tell me the details; I don’t want to know`. Yes, it is so easy to only use our brain power to inhibit checking procedures.

Much damage is done by people who don’t know that they don’t enough about the things they say and decisions they take. Yes, they are ignorant (which is bad enough) – but many show a complacent ignorance (and that makes it unbearable).

Well, no one may claim that truth is necessary for survival. If a person in the savannah mistakes an antelope for a wildebeest (gnu) and kills it, no one cares about his mistaken belief – because it serves food. 

This is one reason why religions don’t have to care much about truth – whatever they say feeds the soul – and that’s apparently enough (evolutionary advantage). It seems that we need this over-confidence.

 

Oh, now I’m exhausted (and you should probably be as well)  - though we have just scratched the surface (a few inches deep). There is so much to say and many people have contributed valuable insight. Please fee free to share your insights as well (and please mark your position):

  • Clinical confabulator
  • Sociopath
  • Self-deceived normal person without tension (no urging drive)
  • Normal confabulator
  • Neutral normal person
  • Self-deceived normal person with tension (urging drive)
  • Lying normal person
  • Obsessive-compulsive normal person
  • Clinical OCD sufferer

 


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