Sublime

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of “nonconscious

In psychology there are at least two biases that drive this pattern. One is confirmation bias:23 seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias:24 seeing what we want to see. These biases don’t just prevent us from applying our intelligence. They can actually contort our intelligence into a weapon against the truth.

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.

Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel

Even when experts are willing to recognize the role of the mind, they continue to insist that it’s all innate!

The more we understand the human mind in causal terms, the harder it becomes to draw a distinction between cases like 4 and 5.

The inventor of Self-Verification Theory, Bill Swann