There is little conscious depth, i.e. depth that we can introspect, experience or enjoy. We don’t think much about which specific centimeter we’ll place our foot at, we just feel the correct motion and perform it.
[Epistemic status: personal observation of mental states which are difficult to describe well]
This doesn’t quite match my experience (though I haven’t had much of this experience for a while, so take this with some extra salt). What I remember is being able to have deep conscious interaction with an ongoing complex motor process like that, but in a less synchronous way. Activities like playing board games involve conscious manipulation in the same subjective timeline as the main flow of action: you consciously think about what move to make, then you reach out to make it, then you consciously observe what your opponents are doing, then repeat (depending on the game of course). Activities like playing music or running, by contrast, involve primarily unconscious cycles as the “main” flow of action, but the conscious mind can still watch it happen and then reach out and touch it in parallel, placing constraints and nudges and altering parameters. What it doesn’t get is waited on for a say in every microdecision, because those are happening too fast—but consciously remembering a finer-grained history lets you try to extrapolate what nudges to give to create the pattern you want next time, which is how I would realize the loop of deliberate practice in motor skills, which I just now notice does make the “(consciously) think, then act” pattern again, but one level of temporal chunking up. And it’s possible to have a conscious say in an upcoming microdecision if the conscious mind predicts them far enough in advance and the unconscious mind has enough spare processing power that the information can be integrated in time.
[Epistemic status: personal observation of mental states which are difficult to describe well]
This doesn’t quite match my experience (though I haven’t had much of this experience for a while, so take this with some extra salt). What I remember is being able to have deep conscious interaction with an ongoing complex motor process like that, but in a less synchronous way. Activities like playing board games involve conscious manipulation in the same subjective timeline as the main flow of action: you consciously think about what move to make, then you reach out to make it, then you consciously observe what your opponents are doing, then repeat (depending on the game of course). Activities like playing music or running, by contrast, involve primarily unconscious cycles as the “main” flow of action, but the conscious mind can still watch it happen and then reach out and touch it in parallel, placing constraints and nudges and altering parameters. What it doesn’t get is waited on for a say in every microdecision, because those are happening too fast—but consciously remembering a finer-grained history lets you try to extrapolate what nudges to give to create the pattern you want next time, which is how I would realize the loop of deliberate practice in motor skills, which I just now notice does make the “(consciously) think, then act” pattern again, but one level of temporal chunking up. And it’s possible to have a conscious say in an upcoming microdecision if the conscious mind predicts them far enough in advance and the unconscious mind has enough spare processing power that the information can be integrated in time.