(April 4, 2013 at 4:21 pm)Mr Infidel Wrote: I believe people do it all the time, though perhaps not in the case of computer screens. For instance, a mother who claims that she had no idea her child was being molested by the father even though there were plenty of signs. The woman simply chose to not see what was really happening.
That makes me wonder: is self-deception a matter of belief? Is it a case of two levels of belief, the conscious and the subconscious? When I was a believer, I defended my faith loyally and without any doubt in my conscious mind. But it's pretty clear that I wasn't convincing myself on some level, else I would not have drifted away from it and eventually abandoned those beliefs.
It's possible that I was choosing one set of beliefs, but the subconscious beliefs that I did not choose were the ones that were more compelling. Just like that mother might convince herself that nothing is going on, but she can't escape the crushing guilt that her subconscious is subjecting her to because the signs are too obvious to completely ignore.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
