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

I count myself among a growing number of scientists who believe that the construction of self identity is not much better than the Lo-fi representations of other people we hold in our heads.

But a human brain is a flawed lens that can understand its own flaws—its systematic errors, its biases—and apply second-order corrections to them.

Who you think you are--your notion of "self"-- is a mere cartoon, just as your notions of other people are cartoon versions of them, but critically these cartoons form the touchpoints of narrative that bind together our mental models of the world and our place in it.

Immanuel Kant, in the eighteenth century, said that the universe as it truly is must be unknowable, and all we ever know is the world through our senses: he made a clear distinction between phenomena , our perceptions of objects, and noumena , the things in themselves.5 More than that, he foreshadowed the Bayesian model of the brain: he argued that