Would you want the superpower of always knowing if someone was lying or not?
How would it work? Does your supersense go off when someone fails to represent their thoughts or emotions truthfully and completely? Does it sense when someone fails to accurately communicate reality? Is a lie purposefully malicious while benign untruths are merely misrepresentations?
I do not want to know if people are lying. Humans lie all the time. We constantly misrepresent our feelings and thoughts and half of the time never know that we lied at all. We don't take the time to search ourselves and know ourselves, and consequently we lie about ourselves. I don't want to know if someone is lying. I want to know what they know about themselves. That's what is really interesting. That is what reveals the most about a person.
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If you look at it at a deep enough level, in one sense we are always lying, because language is such that we can never provide adequation. the full representation of myself is both my entire past, and simply the present I. 'Tis the joy of identity. But I concur that knowing "lies" would be a very bad superpower if not only for the philosophical troubles it would create.
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