This week, we’re examining the limits of self-knowledge. That is, we’ll be asking how well we really know ourselves. There’s a long tradition in philosophy, of course, of thinking that we actually know ourselves quite well. Descartes, who has a reasonable claim to be the founder of this tradition, apparently thought that we had infallible and complete knowledge of everything going on in our minds. And he is certainly not the only philosopher to think that. Moreover, commonsense seems to agree with Descartes too. Suppose I want to know what I think or feel or plan do. I don’t have to consult some fancy expert or do some elaborate experiment. I don't have to consult some third party. I just need to do a little reflection and introspection.

Of course, Freud taught us long ago that it’s not that simple. Many of our beliefs and desires are hidden from us. They’re repressed, locked up in the unconscious. And it can take some pretty expensive therapy to ferret them out. No doubt, Freud’s theory of the unconscious has definitely had a huge influence in all sorts of fields, from psychology, to philosophy, to art and literature. There’s just one problem with it. It’s false -- totally unsupported by scientific evidence. However, although Freud’sparticularview of the unconscious may be false, there’s a ton of evidence that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think.

就拿我们自己的情绪来说吧。其实我现在心情很好。I’m blogging for中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播. Hopefully lots of people will read what I write and make some sharp coments. What could be better? And I know that I’m not just making that all up in order to put myself in a better mood. But although people are good at knowingwhatmood they’re in, but not so good at knowingwhy. Here’s a little experiment for you. Take a bunch a people and ask them to keep track of their mood changes over time. Then ask them to explain thecausesof their mood changes. They’ll talk about their stress levels or workloads or the amount of sleep they got or the weather or day of the week. Now those may seem like perfectly plausible explanations. I know rainy days and Mondays do tend to get down. But when you do the measurements and gather some actual statistical data, it turns out there’s very little correlation between our mood swings and things like the day of the week or the state of the weather.

现在的说法并不是说人们只是凭空编造了他们情绪变化的原因。例如，有时我们会抓住现成的文化模因来解释自己。我在最后一段写了。引用这些现成的文化模因让我们觉得我们了解自己，即使我们并不了解自己。

Just to be clear, I am not claiming that people know absolutelynothing关于自己情绪的原因。想想我们是如何知道别人情绪的原因的。例如，我很擅长预测我妻子和儿子的情绪。我很久以前就学会了在早上，在他们洗澡或吃一顿丰盛的早餐之前，和他们保持距离。通过内省，我显然不知道所有这些。相反，我和他们一起生活了很长时间。这些年来，我观察到了一些规律。我像科学家一样接近他们。我采用了一种超然的、第三人称的、实验性的观点。这里有一些关于了解自己的建议。 Do the same with yourself. That is, look at yourself the way that an objective, outside, third-person observer would. It’s a little like Flannery O’Conner, who said “I don’t know what I think until I read what I write.”

我知道这可能看起来有点反，如果你必须知道你在写之前的想法，它可能看起来。但我认为奥康纳有一个非常深刻的观点。我们喜欢认为我们只通过审视自己的内心，通过内省的反思来了解自己的思想。但事实并非如此。

But once we admit that, we do seem to have a problem – a pretty deep problem. We live and experience our lives in thefirst人称，不要用第三人称。Lived experience is about how weseemto ourselves. If the way we seem to ourselves is so out of synch with how we really are, doesn't that mean that we’re mostly being buffeted about by forces over which we have no real control, and into which we may have no real insight? That’s why it matters whether we really know ourselves.

So why not listen in this week and help us figure out exactly how wide the gap between the way weappearto ourselves and the way we actuallyare,really is.