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?
