There’s a popular position that goes something like “trust people when they tell you how they are feeling, what it’s like to be them, etc.”. I have a hard time with this, because I am so often wrong about what I think it’s like to be me, and my experience is that many people are similarly deluded into a false sense of confidence that they understand themselves well. But also because talk is cheap evidence, and thus must be discounted when updating beliefs.
Now first off I have to say that the opposite position also seems wrong to me. People clearly have some insight into what’s going on with themselves. It’s not as if when someone says “ouch, you hurt me” they’re just saying random words uncorrelated with reality. But also talk is cheap and you can say the words “ouch, you hurt me” when in fact you were not hurt. If there’s incentives to say “ouch, you hurt me” even when not hurt, you may utter those words even if not hurt because doing so is likely to generate a good outcome for you. For bonus points, to make your utterance really convincing and thus more likely to effectively get you what you want, you might even convince yourself that you really were hurt even when you weren’t.
This means that when someone makes a self-claim, I’m forced to discount that claim against the probability that the self-claim reflects hallucination, confusion, delusion, or outright deception. Self-claims become more reliable when backed by costly signals, but without such costly signals it’s hard to update much on most self-claims.
There’s a popular position that goes something like “trust people when they tell you how they are feeling, what it’s like to be them, etc.”. I have a hard time with this, because I am so often wrong about what I think it’s like to be me, and my experience is that many people are similarly deluded into a false sense of confidence that they understand themselves well. But also because talk is cheap evidence, and thus must be discounted when updating beliefs.
Now first off I have to say that the opposite position also seems wrong to me. People clearly have some insight into what’s going on with themselves. It’s not as if when someone says “ouch, you hurt me” they’re just saying random words uncorrelated with reality. But also talk is cheap and you can say the words “ouch, you hurt me” when in fact you were not hurt. If there’s incentives to say “ouch, you hurt me” even when not hurt, you may utter those words even if not hurt because doing so is likely to generate a good outcome for you. For bonus points, to make your utterance really convincing and thus more likely to effectively get you what you want, you might even convince yourself that you really were hurt even when you weren’t.
This means that when someone makes a self-claim, I’m forced to discount that claim against the probability that the self-claim reflects hallucination, confusion, delusion, or outright deception. Self-claims become more reliable when backed by costly signals, but without such costly signals it’s hard to update much on most self-claims.