Stephen Fleming: The Limits of Self Knowledge

Stephen Fleming is a professor of cognitive neuroscience whose work focuses on metacognition - what people think or know about their own minds - and the computational and neural basis of subjective experience. He’s the author of the book Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. Today’s topics include the possibility of self deception; cognitive biases and what we can do to guard against them; the benefits and drawbacks of improved metacognition; the relationship between metacognition of conscious experience; the theoretical limits of self knowledge; and other topics. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers and get access to bonus content, episode notes, and subscriber perks, visit: https://www.matthewgeleta.com/ Chapters: 0:00:00 Intro 0:01:20 Self deception 0:08:08 Cognitive biases and over confidence 0:14:40 Evolution of metacognitive biases 0:18:18 Dunning Kruger effect 0:20:52 Split brain experiments and self narratives 0:25:32 Delusion of self understanding 0:29:54 Isolation of losing touch with reality 0:34:38 How good is our metacognition? 0:38:53 Metacognition vs performance 0:42:46 How trainable is metacognition? 0:46:51 Limits of self knowledge 0:50:52 Theory of self vs others 0:54:16 Benefits from improving metacognition 1:01:40 Psychosis and reality vs imagination 1:14:15 The hard problem of consciousness 1:27:05 Book recommendations 1:33:35 Who should represent humanity to an AI superintelligence?