It seems to me you are trying to deceive yourself into thinking that you cannot comfortably self-deceive. Your effort may indeed make it harder to self-deceive, but I doubt it changes your situation all that much. Admit it, you are human, and within the usual human range of capabilities and tendencies for self-deception.
We have a continuum of degrees of deliberation to our actions. Even if I agree that you cannot self-deceive at the strongest degree of deliberation, that isn’t in practice much of a restriction on your ability to self-deceive.
Might seem that way to you because you don’t actually go around all day saying, “And now I shall doublethink myself into believing X!” Deliberate self-deception is a subset of self-deception well worth slicing off the carcass. E.g. Utilitarian from OB.
Just because the boundary of deliberate self-deception is fuzzy, doesn’t mean the boundary is not worth drawing. The more so in this particular case, as if you wonder “Is this a deliberate self-deception that I can’t get away with, or a non-deliberate one that I might still be able to pull off?” it has already reached the point of being deliberate. (Repeating this to yourself will make it even more true.)
It may be the case that you can easily self deceive if and only if you think you can self deceive, in which case robin’s comment is an attempt to cause Eliezer serious brain damage…
It seems to me you are trying to deceive yourself into thinking that you cannot comfortably self-deceive. Your effort may indeed make it harder to self-deceive, but I doubt it changes your situation all that much. Admit it, you are human, and within the usual human range of capabilities and tendencies for self-deception.
Thus did I carefully write, “cannot deliberately self-deceive”, not, “cannot self-deceive”.
We have a continuum of degrees of deliberation to our actions. Even if I agree that you cannot self-deceive at the strongest degree of deliberation, that isn’t in practice much of a restriction on your ability to self-deceive.
Might seem that way to you because you don’t actually go around all day saying, “And now I shall doublethink myself into believing X!” Deliberate self-deception is a subset of self-deception well worth slicing off the carcass. E.g. Utilitarian from OB.
Just because the boundary of deliberate self-deception is fuzzy, doesn’t mean the boundary is not worth drawing. The more so in this particular case, as if you wonder “Is this a deliberate self-deception that I can’t get away with, or a non-deliberate one that I might still be able to pull off?” it has already reached the point of being deliberate. (Repeating this to yourself will make it even more true.)
It may be the case that you can easily self deceive if and only if you think you can self deceive, in which case robin’s comment is an attempt to cause Eliezer serious brain damage…