Can People Be Honestly Wrong About Their Own Experiences?

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/can-people-be-honestly-wrong-about

A tangent of the jhana discussion: I asserted that people can’t be wrong about their own experience.

That is, if someone says they don’t feel hungry, maybe they’re telling the truth, and they don’t feel hungry. Or maybe they’re lying: saying they don’t feel hungry even though they know they really do (eg they’re fasting, and they want to impress their friends with how easy it is for them). But there isn’t some third option, where they honestly think they’re not experiencing hunger, but really they are.

Commenters brought up some objections: aren’t there people who honestly say they don’t feel hungry, but then if you give them food, they’ll wolf it down and say “Man, that really hit the spot, I guess I didn’t realize how hungry I was”?

Yes, this sometimes happens. But I don’t think of it as lying about internal experience. I think of it as: their stomach is empty, they have low blood sugar, they have various other physiological correlates of needing food - but for some reason they’re not consciously experiencing the qualia of hunger. Their body is hungry, but their conscious mind isn’t. They say they don’t feel hungry, and their description of their own feeling is accurate.

This is also how I interpret people who say “I’m not still angry about my father”, but then every time you mention their father they storm off and won’t talk to you for the rest of the day. Clearly they still have some trauma about their father that they have to deal with. But it doesn’t manifest itself as a conscious feeling of anger. This person could accurately be described as “they don’t feel conscious anger about their father, but mentioning their father can trigger stress-related behaviors”.

Linch gives an especially difficult example:

I think it's possible for people to fool themselves about internal states. My favorite example is time perception. You can meditate or take drugs in ways that make you think that your clock speed has gone up and your subjective experience of your subjective experience of time is slowed down. But your actual subjective experience of time isn't much faster clock speeds (as could be evidenced by trying to do difficult computational tasks in those stats).

But I think this can be defeated by the same maneuver. Just as you can be right about feeling like you’re not hungry, when in fact your body needs food, so you can be right about it feeling like time moves slowly for you, when in fact it’s moving at a normal rate.