Stephen Fleming: The Limits of Self Knowledge

Stephen Fleming is a professor of cognitive neuroscience whose work focuses on metacognition - what people think or know about their own minds - and the computational and neural basis of subjective experience. He’s the author of the book Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness.

Today’s topics include the possibility of self deception; cognitive biases and what we can do to guard against them; the benefits and drawbacks of improved metacognition; the relationship between metacognition of conscious experience; the theoretical limits of self knowledge; and other topics.

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Chapters:

0:00:00 Intro

0:01:20 Self deception

0:08:08 Cognitive biases and over confidence

0:14:40 Evolution of metacognitive biases

0:18:18 Dunning Kruger effect

0:20:52 Split brain experiments and self narratives

0:25:32 Delusion of self understanding

0:29:54 Isolation of losing touch with reality

0:34:38 How good is our metacognition?

0:38:53 Metacognition vs performance

0:42:46 How trainable is metacognition?

0:46:51 Limits of self knowledge

0:50:52 Theory of self vs others

0:54:16 Benefits from improving metacognition

1:01:40 Psychosis and reality vs imagination

1:14:15 The hard problem of consciousness

1:27:05 Book recommendations

1:33:35 Who should represent humanity to an AI superintelligence?