There seems to be a module in my brain responsible for making sense of my experiences. It integrates information about the past and present, and about myself and the world around me. And there’s another module responsible for trying to rationalize the decisions of the first module. (NO_ITEM_DATA:haidt2013) calls these “the Press Secretary” and “the President” in the brain:

If you want to see post hoc reasoning (rationalization) in action, just watch the press secretary of a president or prime minister take questions from reporters. No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it. Reporters then challenge assertions and bring up contradictory quotes from the politician, or even quotes straight from the press secretary on previous days. Sometimes you’ll hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words, but what you’ll never hear is: “Hey, that’s a great point! Maybe we should rethink this policy.”

Press secretaries cannot speak like this because they don’t have the power to create or revise presidential decrees. His job is limited to finding evidence that explains the president’s decisions. The reason: Bullshitting ourselves is probably strategic ignorance, and this is what makes the press secretary in the brain so dangerous—both morally and epistemically. Its function is to create spurious justifications and make it difficult to detect both for other people and for ourselves.

Therefore, what we believe to be the “self” is actually just the “Press Secretary”. That’s why a lot of rationalists end up chasing their own tails. As Rival Voices tweeted once: “Trying to make decisions consciously is literally putting the PR department in the CEO role.”

David Hume, three centuries ago, noted that “reason is, and can only be, a slave to passions; it can only claim the role of serving and obeying them.” (NO_ITEM_DATA:hume2015) But I think he was only partially right. If we were unable to defuse our inner president, i.e. if our unconscious mind was completely in charge, that would invalidate the universal computation theory of the mind, which means there would be a class of problems we wouldn’t be able to solve—and this is not what David Deutsch believes (NO_ITEM_DATA:lovgren2020). We can override our subconscious mind/inner president, like when we use Use the Fun Criterion to resolve discomfort. In that sense, the president handles our inexplicit theories, and the press secretary our explicit theories. On the other hand, Hume was also right in the sense that We can’t lie, but we can bullshit ourselves.