People already lie to themselves and are lied to. Millions of years of evolution have given us a brain with a remarkable ability to heal over any damage to its worldview. (See _Phantoms in the Brain._)
That's not quite the same as a brain "healing over damage to its worldview" though. That's a side effect of the brain incorporating multiple input sources to overcome unreliable and noisy data. It's not the brain "lying to itself", but the brain recognizing (and I'm stretching the word "recognize" here because this is not a conscious effect at all) that auditory input is less reliable than visual input for differentiating certain consonants, and letting the visual interpretation dominate.
This is really a very different concept from self-deception, because it has evolved specifically because in practice it tends to provide a more accurate view of the world.
On the other hand, self-deception measures, by definition, function to decrease the accuracy of our worldview in order to help us in some other way. For example, realizing that the waterfall at the top of the mountain is not inhabited by a fertility spirit will make your worldview more accurate, but it may also get you executed by the rest of your village, and since lying convincingly is harder than professing a legitimately false belief, we have evolved to cultivate false beliefs when it is politically expedient.
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People already lie to themselves and are lied to. Millions of years of evolution have given us a brain with a remarkable ability to heal over any damage to its worldview. (See _Phantoms in the Brain._)
AR is not the gating factor here.
"People already lie to themselves"
The most compelling illustration I've seen of this is the McGurk Affect[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&...
That's not quite the same as a brain "healing over damage to its worldview" though. That's a side effect of the brain incorporating multiple input sources to overcome unreliable and noisy data. It's not the brain "lying to itself", but the brain recognizing (and I'm stretching the word "recognize" here because this is not a conscious effect at all) that auditory input is less reliable than visual input for differentiating certain consonants, and letting the visual interpretation dominate.
This is really a very different concept from self-deception, because it has evolved specifically because in practice it tends to provide a more accurate view of the world.
On the other hand, self-deception measures, by definition, function to decrease the accuracy of our worldview in order to help us in some other way. For example, realizing that the waterfall at the top of the mountain is not inhabited by a fertility spirit will make your worldview more accurate, but it may also get you executed by the rest of your village, and since lying convincingly is harder than professing a legitimately false belief, we have evolved to cultivate false beliefs when it is politically expedient.