This post is a continuation of a thought exercise started in two prior posts.
I encourage you to read them in order.
1. Language, Truth, Perspective, Paradigm...
Now to address that bit about lying. Even the most honest of people is a liar.
Ignore for the moment that almost everyone justifies making dishonest statements on occasion, to spare someone's feelings ("Oh what a cute baby!", "That was delicious!", "Oh, I wish I could go with you, but I have something else going on then, maybe some other time though."...).
Ignore also the lies of omission - keeping our mouth shut about something we have information about, to avoid inconvenience or injury.
We lie to ourselves.
A lot.
And it isn't just the stream of negative lies we tell ourselves about ourselves (Usually some variation of "I'm not good enough...").
Nor is it just the positive lies we often unknowingly believe. (For example; most people think they are good at multitasking, but actual studies suggest less than 3% of the population actually is. Perhaps this helps explain why roughly 80% of people are in favor of laws prohibiting texting while driving, yet over 70% of people admit to texting and driving. Interestingly, it has been found that those people who are more confident in their multi-tasking abilities are often less capable at multitasking.)
No, our deceitfulness goes much deeper.
First, take a look at this picture (drew it myself, can you tell?), which tree is closer to you, 1 or 2?
The correct answer is: They are both the exact same distance away from you. I drew the first tree. then I copied it, pasted it, and enlarged it to create tree number 2. I then drew a triangle, cut the top off, drew a horizontal line near the top of the page and added some color to it.
But none of that changes the fact that it was drawn on a flat screen. Your brain adds a third dimension to the image, but this is a two-dimensional drawing. Your brain lies to you.
Your eyeballs see two dimensionally. Light reflects off stuff, enters your eye, and hits a series of sensors in the back of your eyeball, nerves transmit information about the intensity and color of that light from each sensor to your brain. since you have two eyeballs, the brain gets information from two slightly different angles. Your brain then interprets that information and "creates an image" Since my two dimensional image above has colors, lines and size differences which your brain customarily "sees" as a horizon, and a road going off into the distance, it interprets the image as having depth, even though there is no depth in reality.
Furthermore, your brain interprets the sensory inputs it receives differently than other people's brains do. There are people who are color blind, for instance, and there are a number of disorders which inhibit depth perception.
Your eyes aren't the only sense with this problem. When I was young, there was a prank which involved touching someone's bare skin with a small, dry, circular piece of ice in a room full of smokers. The person would be utterly convinced someone had just poked them with a lit cigarette. Given the environmental cues, they couldn't correctly distinguish hot from cold.
So right off, the sensory information you receive may be distorted, often in ways that would be difficult or impossible to detect (what if everyone saw the color green as a different color? How would we know? If I saw green as what you knew to be purple, we would still look at the grass and agree that it was green...).
And then there is the brain's desire to find patterns. From the Rubin Vase optical illusion (is it a vase, or two faces?), to religious figures appearing on toast or pizza or buildings, to satanic messages played backwards in popular music (I found one once that I would let people listen to- a brief clip where the singer says something about "eating a Tuna". Except I didn't actually play the clip backwards, it was forward, and the song is in Norwegian. Look up "Ankomst" by the band Leaves Eyes - right around 2:10 into the song you will hear it- if you are a native English speaker. If you speak Norwegian, you most probably won't catch it), our brains are determined to give meaning to everything, even if it means concocting an alligator in Logan, Utah.
Ever heard the phrase "garbage in, garbage out"?
Then it shouldn't surprise you that your memory is just as untrustworthy. As an example- in the 1990's when DNA testing became a thing, an evaluation was made of 239 convictions which were overturned based on DNA evidence. It was found that nearly 80% of those convictions came about due to eye witness testimony.
It has also been determined that in some cases, false memories can be created by suggestion. In a study performed in 1995, a group of people we given a list of four memories from their childhood. Three were actual events from their childhood and the fourth was fictional. They were then asked to write down details they remembered from those experiences, or to note if they had no recollection of the event. One-fourth of the people in the study related memories they had of the fictional event.
The input is unreliable. The output is untrustworthy. imagine how much worse it gets when it is us making a poor interpretation of someone else's poor interpretation? In an entirely different context (i.e. historical analysis).
Not matter how much effort you put toward being honest, You still lie like crazy.
