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A while back, I read the article “The Three Levels of Self-Awareness” by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The article contains some really interesting insights that I’ve never really appreciated before reading it. It talks about the subconscious mind, the conscious mind, and the rational mind. It’s really interesting to think about how all of these are interconnected and how they affect our behavior.
Sartre posits that we are a complex set of mental operations that function in a very specific way. We have a conscious mind that is fully aware of our actions and emotions, but in our subconscious, we have a “numb” state. It’s this “numb” state that allows us to be totally rational and yet still have the capacity to be impulsive and irrational. It is that state of being that is referred to as “self-aware.
We are all aware of how our behavior affects other people, but how much we know about ourselves is limited. It is a mistake to think that there is a “self” that exists independent of our actions. We are all affected by all the actions of others. Our thoughts, feelings, and actions affect each other. We can never be truly independent of others.
We all know this instinctively. We know that we affect our family, our friends, and our enemies. We know that we can be affected by the actions of others, but how we feel about this is not as clear. We know that we can’t be truly independent. We can not be totally rational, and yet still have the capacity to be impulsive and irrational.
We can’t be totally rational, but we can be impulsive. We can be impulsive when we feel we have no other choice. We can feel as though we have no other choice, but we have. We can not be totally rational, but we can be impulsive. We can be impulsive in our thoughts and actions, but we can not be totally rational.
It is, in fact, quite a paradox that we can be totally rational and impulsive simultaneously. This paradox is called the “cognitive illusion.” This idea is so important, but so hard to explain, that it is worth being quoted: “The cognitive illusion is an idea that we often have that we can think and act rationally, but that we cannot in fact think and act rationally.
The cognitive illusion basically says that the “rational” part of us is somehow separate from the “impulsive” part of us. For example, if you think about the way you could go about buying and selling a house, it seems to your rational self that you could do it that way. But you yourself, your rational self, must admit that it is not really possible to buy and sell a house that way.
The cognitive illusion, often referred to as “self-deception,” is a self-deceptive self-image that one creates in order to be able to think and act rationally. The most common example of the cognitive illusion is the belief that one is not responsible for their actions because they are not really responsible for them.
I’m not sure whether it’s really possible for the rational self to buy and sell a house. I don’t really think so, but I think it’s worth looking at for a moment because I am always amazed at how much the rational self does sometimes, and why it does. It’s a lot like the whole idea of “self-deception” thing which, while it’s not a real thing, is so important that it deserves some discussion.
My husband and I first went to Paris in 1994. We had a great time. We wanted to go back for a vacation, and we did. We got stuck in the middle of the airport in Madrid, and we ended up at a place we could have called “the madhouse.” We were told the price of the apartment was $4.2 million. We had to pay an extra $1.
