The Persistent Delusion of Honesty and Will

the last honest man

I spend four months trying to decide if I will buy the Red Ferrari or the Beige Volvo SUV for the family wagon. I have the money for either car but I must pick based on rational support for the best vehicle argument. I make a list of pros and cons and research reliability, dependability and balls out fun for each ride. Finally my old car dies on the highway and I must choose. I go with the Volvo.

The next day I am driving the family wagon home and it occurs to me that I made the exact right choice. The utilitarian benefit of a seat belt for each member of the family versus two cramped bucket seats is obvious now. The ground clearance will allow me to drive down bumpy roads. There are so many reasons that I correctly picked the Volvo that I am not even sure how the choice was so hard. Why did I ever seriously consider the Ferrari?

Picture Unrelated to an SUV

A month later I read a story about a rich millionaire playboy dying at the wheel of my Red Ferrari. What a fool he was for even considering that middle age crazy death trap. I don't reflect on my difficult decision - I am now convinced that I never considered a sports car at all. What is the evolutionary reason for this behavior? Why is it so easily and popular for everyone to delude themselves in such a way? We don't really know all the answers but from the discipline of Evolutionary Psychology we can suggest plausible causes and conditions.

I may see, hear and smell most of what happens around me. If I was in an isolation tank and one after another the various smells of the day were pumped in to my tank, I could easily identify frying bacon, rotting fruit and a dirty diaper. I could hear conversations that were loud enough for me to hear when I was not so isolated but that I had ignored. If the day was slowed down for me inside the tank I would find that outside the tank I generally ignored 90% of the stimulus 'available' in real time outside the tank. I do not allow most of the stimulus thrown at me during an average day to rise to the level of reflective cognition. I don't think about the things I don't think about. In short, I live a life of constant and repeated self-delusion. I feel free and in charge - I feel like I must have been using all that input to make good choices.

Robert Trivers laid the ground work for reciprocal altruism with his groundbreaking "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" (1971). Many evolutionary psychologist consider the impact of Triver's work the equal of E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology. He may be the most worthy person you have never heard of. In order to pull off the chore of living we don't allow ourselves to know ourselves. Consider the will to act of volition. certainly we have a handle on our behavior - I am not an uncouth yokel with seriously bad manners.


The most deluded of us consider free will to work this way. A fly lands on my nose. I know what flies are and how flies behave and I do not want the shit on a fly's legs on my nose. I prepare for the swat and as the fly departs I attempt to swat it away. I most likely took the input, made the decision to swat and then swatted the fly. The fact is - you did nothing of the sort. When test subjects are monitored for the timing of these events

1. an input - fly lands
2. a cognitive event rising to consciousness (really? how can I be sure?)
3. a decision to swat (really? when does a batter decide to swing at a pitch? really?)
4. a swat

If you still believe that step 3 happens as an intercession between sensation, perception and conscious behavior you are not right - you are not even wrong. There is no step three; never was, never will be. In lab experiments, the impulse that fires motor neurons in your arm and shoulder comes 100-200 milliseconds (100 thousandths of a second is a tenth of a second) before people hooked to electrodes actually 'make a subjective report' that they intended to swat. The swat is unbidden by conscious awareness that I already swatted at the fly before I 'knew' I was going to swat.

Plato's Playboy Mansion Groto

In fact, awareness of having just completed an act that seems like it should be volitional when it manifestly is not corrodes my faith in free will or conscious behavior. This feeling is so easily corroded by the testimony of science that I must begin to reassess what it means to be human - what it means to have sentience for what would sentience mean if it does not give me volition. Our minds have trapped us in the persistant delusion that we are not in straight-jackets. Almost all human behavior is determined by operant conditioning. Unless you are doing your own operant conditioning through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - and you should be - you are a meat puppet in the truest sense.

Not A Greek Philosopher

Plato's Cave is one of the first written accounts of what consciousness might actually look like. We are the prisoners in a cave, chained to a wall and forever forced to watch the shadows on the wall of the cave in front of us. Behind us our betters hold up cut-outs or shapes that cast the shadows on the wall. These shadows are mere pale reflections of objects which are themselves mere representations. This is the only reality available to us in our cave. If let free into the light outside the cave we would be unable to cope with 'reality' - the new kind of reality we have never seen.

What I am suggesting is that we are prisoners to the persistant delusion of continuous availablity of voalition. Our most precious self-delusion is that we have the kind of freedom the people in the cave do not. Where is the kind of free will we can use - apart from this shabby, cheap contrivance we have now?

The short answer is to read Dan Dennett. My compressed version is summed up in the image below. Free yourself from the cave by understanding how the logistics map pinpoints rare instances of indeterminacy in a overwhelmingly deterministic universe.