Self-awareness and self-deception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the relation between self-deception and self-consciousness.It has been argued that, if we follow the literalist and take self-deception at face value -as a deception that is intended by, and imposed on, one and the same self-conscious subject -then self-deception is impossible.It will incur the Dynamic Problem that, being aware of my intention to self-deceive, I shall see through my projected self-deceit from the outset, thereby precluding its possibility.And it will incur the following Static Problem.Qua self-deceiver, I shall believe not-P, but -qua self-deceived -I shall believe P. We shall then have to explain how I can sustain contradictory beliefs in full self-awareness.I argue that this rejection of literalism about self-deception rests on error.First, it misunderstands what literalism holds.Properly understood, literalism does not require the simultaneous commitment to contradictory beliefs.Second, it misunderstands the relation between self-deception and self-consciousness -and that is my primary focus.The phenomenology of self-deception reveals that the self-deceiver experiences the following tension.She is somehow aware of her self-deception as such.Yet also, she misrepresents that selfdeception to herself as being a sincere commitment to the truth -so, in that sense, she is not aware of her self-deceit as such.To capture this tension, we require a theory of self-consciousnessindependently defensible in its own right -that will meet this twofold requirement, of permitting the self-deceiver not to see what is right before her gaze.The rejection of literalism presupposes that no theory of self-consciousness can meet this twofold requirement.I argue that this twofold requirement can be met.The first part of this thesis offers a detailed defence of a theory of self-consciousness.The second part shows how this theory of selfconsciousness can faithfully capture the tension of self-deception, while eschewing the Dynamic and Static Problems.It thereby claims to vindicate the literalist's position.I would like to express my gratitude, first and foremost, to my supervisors, Alia Al-Saji, David Davies, and Ian Gold.Their support, positivity, and
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".