Why You Don't Know Yourself (And Why That's OK)
You're made of actions. The self is a ghost in abstract.
This is Part 2 in a series about self-cultivation click here for part 1.
In the 1970’s, researchers showed a split-brain patient’s right hemisphere a card that said ‘walk’. When the patient stood to leave, the researchers asked ‘Why did you stand up to leave?’
The patient’s speaking left hemisphere answered confidently ‘I wanted to go get a Coke’.1
This study reveals an extreme example of a concept that has been borne out by modern cognitive science over the past 60 years; the brain can often act, feel, or believe and then create reasons for that mental state.
If this reverse reasoning happens subconsciously, how can we trust more subjective kinds of self-knowledge like who we are as a person?
We often believe introspection offers direct access to who we are. But what if the self is not something we uncover—but something we construct? This essay explores how cognitive science, philosophy, and language reveal a more active, observable path to self-understanding—one built through action, reflection, and creation.
Introspection is a Funhouse Mirror
The term introspection illusion refers to a cognitive bias in which people believe they have direct, reliable access to the causes of their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In reality, as we’ve already shown, they do not have access to their own thoughts.
People under the spell of the introspection illusion are liable to mistake their own confabulations for genuine insight.
Emily Pronin, who coined the term introspective illusion, says the illusion has four main components:
People use introspection to assess their own mental states
People use behavior to asses others’ mental states
People trust introspection even when it’s misleading
People do not apply the same skepticism to their own introspections as they do to others’ behavior.
In The Opacity of Mind, Peter Carruthers defends the claim that we possess a single mental faculty for assessing the mental states of both ourselves and others.
This suggests the self-knowledge we gain through introspection isn’t a special kind of knowledge. It’s better to view it as a deceptive kind of half-data-point that needs to be grown into a whole idea before it’s truly useful.
But how do we actually grow our introspection into full self-knowledge?
If introspection is vulnerable to illusion, and behavior is prone to misinterpretation, then perhaps self-knowledge isn’t found in any one moment or modality—but must be triangulated over time: through what we say, what we do, and how we reflect.
Revealing the Self Through Action
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
...
—David Whyte, Start Close InAction helps us observe our patterns.
Our patterns reveal what we really believe, what we really value, and what we truly want.
John Dewey, perhaps the most famous pragmatist philosopher, argued that we don’t start with a clear sense of self that acts. We become ourselves through action—by how we navigate the world, respond to consequences, spend our free time, and revise our habits.
“We do not learn from experience,” he wrote, “we learn from reflecting on experience.” Self-knowledge is not a passive uncovering of what’s inside us that’s meant to inform future action. It’s an active process of engaging, adjusting, and reflecting. The self is not hidden deep within—it’s written across the arc of our behavior.
The self is a ghost in abstract.
Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett offers a complementary lens. He frames the self as the “center of narrative gravity.” In this view, our identity isn’t something we have, it’s something we construct by observing what we do and telling ourselves stories about it.
He frames the self as several parallel drafts driven by split-brain experiments—constantly stitching parallel narrative drafts that are sometimes accurate, sometimes not. The fact that this narrative is unconsciously created may seem to make it meaningless.
On the contrary, the act of narrating—of giving scaffolding to action—is how the self coheres over time.
Learning Our Own Thoughts Through Language
...
To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes an
intimate private ear
that can
really listen
to another.
...
— David Whyte, Start Close InLanguage helps us observe and complete our thoughts.
“Thought undergoes many changes as it turns into speech” as Vygotsky puts it.
When Cheryl Strayed began writing Wild, which eventually became a bestselling memoir, she was a heroin addict trying to outrun herself. By her own account, she was lost. As she wrote, the very act of turning her experiences into language alchemized them—in her own words: “Writing Wild was not about remembering who I had been, but about becoming someone who could bear to look back. The story didn’t live in the past. I lived in the words.”
Joan Didion, perhaps the most famous personal essayist of all time, famously stated, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking […] Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.”
These and many other great minds have noticed that the brain seems to be a mess of half-thoughts masquerading as whole ideas. Articulating our thoughts doesn’t expose them so much as it remodels them in real time.
Seeing what we’ve written is one way of discovering both what we truly think, feel, believe, and the reasons behind it.
Conclusion
...
Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.
...
— David Whyte, Start Close InIf all you do is consume and ruminate, you’ll remain a mystery to yourself.
Creation is how you come to meet yourself. Your own actions are evidence of what you truly believe.
Taken together, these thinkers point to a consistent pattern: our introspections are fallible, our behavior often says more than we realize, and our self-understanding emerges over time—through action, narration, and reflection
You must take the action. You must observe yourself carefully. You must come to view yourself as neither fully transparent nor fully knowable and act accordingly.
In the next section, I’ll talk more about examples of effective frameworks for this type of structured introspection, which leads to durable self-knowledge that can form a basis for self-cultivation.
The point of all of this is to arrive at the meaningful life that is centered in the true you. The one you can’t see without looking from the outside in.
Gazzaniga, The Ethical Brain, 1998
The insight that "creation is how you come to meet yourself" is particularly powerful. Writers like Cheryl Strayed and Joan Didion demonstrate that externalization through creative expression forces completion of half-formed thoughts and reveals patterns we couldn't see internally. This suggests that producing tangible outputs may be more revealing than meditation or introspection alone. I consider myself a "maker" and have not considered that both the process of making, as well as what I create, may be part of the personal process of discovering who I am. Thank you for this thoughtful insight. I have some things to research and reflect on, specifically being wary of "telling ourselves stories", which can be self-deceptive without thoughtfully considering other perspectives. Oh, the lies we tell ourselves...