What Is It Like When You Don't Know That You Don't Know?

What if a thief believes he won't get caught because he thinks he is invisible?  This really happened.

First, some insight into how we tick.  The anchoring effect. Human brains have built in thought-saving functions to enable action.

In 2006 at MIT Dan Ariely, Drazen Prelec, and George Loewenstein asked students to bid on a bottle of wine. As a sales pitch, they described the great quality of the bottle. The anchoring effect occurred when each student had to write down the last two digits of his or her social security number as if it were the price of the item. The anchoring effect influenced their judgement. Say the last two social security digits were 11, then the student bid $11 or a relatively lower offer. If 33. the bid was $33 or in that range. If, say, 55, the the bid was higher yet. The outcome was that students with higher numbers paid up to 346 percent more than those with lower numbers. The experiment demonstrates that people are tricked by inherent functions of their own brains, in this case something they saw before biased them to a judgement not based on rational processing.

In the evolution of species we didn't have time to mull things over. It was act or die. Thus the anchoring effect.

I am not saying the anchoring effect bears on the thief's situation.  I am saying none of us uses reason as much as we believe we do. What follows is different. It shows self-delusion of a different kind. The thief's kind.

Anosognosia is a term to describe a deficit of self-awareness. It describes a clinical condition in which a person with some disability seems unaware of its existence.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a term for a cognitive bias. (David Dunning, Justin Kruger.) The bias can occur in people of low ability. It imparts an illusory superiority in which they mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. As Errol Morris put it, "Our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence."

This report of a crime suggests both.

"At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast " (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, article by Michael A. Fuoco, 1995, o/a January 13).

Read on for what happened as well as the thief's response.

Intellect and The Parable of The Poisoned Arrow

What do I know? This. Something sees a dissected brain on a laboratory table and what sees is not an object like the thing cut open on the table. Can I explain beyond that? No.

Sure, I can talk about brain neurons and the optical cortex, and that does provide an objective correlative to explain the processes involved in seeing. But it does not explain the seeing itself.

I found the study of consciousness through brain science quite helpful in providing objective explanations about mind.  There is, for example, neuro-plasticity, which provides evidence that intention (roughly, the "will" part of free will) can help the brain change itself. (See Paul Bach-y-Rita, who taught his father to walk after a stroke). But that was as far as it went.

In The Parable of The Poisoned Arrow (more later), Buddha was in effect talking about intellect but not the kind brain scientists used to discover neuro-plasticity. So this article is about what he meant and what he did not mean.

As I already knew would happen, none of my readings in neuroscience and the philosophy of consciousness got me any closer to seeing as seeing.  Buddha meant that I start with experience. Not my everyday experience, although I could use it, but instead what reveals itself in deep meditation.

A sensation arises in a leg attended by a sensation of the leg itself. The sensation comes with the leg as something "there." The edges of this body are sensations of a location. But all arises in the empty space of consciousness. The space can have faint, wispy boundaries but they too are sensations. Sensations arising and falling away, to be followed by new ones arising and passing.