Self-Aware Confabulation

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

― H. L. Mencken

I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.

― Jacques Lacan

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

― H. L. Mencken, again

The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler was the piece that first introduced me to the idea. I often felt like the Elephant's takes are overly cynical, and the same goes for other pieces of Hanson's writing. That is, before I read Edward Teach's Sadly, Porn that is outright misanthropic, and still feels pretty accurate whenever I can make any sense of it.

The core thesis in both of these books is somewhat similar. The Elephant in the Brain says that there's a unconscious part, the Elephant, that does self-interested stuff like status-seeking. To be able to present a prosocial personality, we then have a separate layer that interprets the actions of the Elephant in a good light. It's hard to call this lying because to be believable we have to believe it ourselves first. And our brains are great at pattern matching and forgetting conflicting details.

Sadly, Porn goes the other way, or perhaps just further. You've domesticated the Elephant. It no longer dares to do the self-interested actions. It's afraid of failure. The internal narrator is repurposed from defending our selfish actions to others, into explaining our lack of actions to ourselves. We're lying to ourselves, trying to uphold our own story of having a high status. Other people are mostly required for external approval.

Reading these books was like partially breaking the 4th wall of the narrator. It became self-aware. Of course I could be just imagining a minor enlightenment instead of experiencing it. That would be such a Sadly, Porn-style mental move. Perhaps we could test this by consciously changing the actions of the Elephant? How would one interpret the results instead of retreating to another abstraction level with the lies? It seems really hard to point at something you've done and say "the Elephant did that".

Both of these models started to look a bit lacking after actually internalizing them. For a long time, I was having a really hard time identifying any motivating factors besides physical needs, hedonism, and status-seeking, thinking that anyone doing other things was lying to either themselves or others, or both. I still somewhat hold these views; I just don't think that the lying part is so absolute. People also have aesthetic preferences (read: values) that do not have obvious self-interested purpose.

But as the saying goes, "all models are wrong, some are useful". I've found both of these quite useful in modelling how others behave. And how I behave, too, albeit disregarding the narrator's explanations is tedious and squeamish work, as convenient answers look very appealing. And all this self-reflection seems to be mostly for entertainment anyway, as for actual results I use more powerful tools.