The unconscious mind is not some dark corner, it’s the vast majority of “you”. It’s what and who you are, all the time you’re not pointing your “Cartesian camcorder” at yourself. It’s the huge huge majority of your computing capacity, nearly all of your personality, nearly all of your motivation, emotion, and beneath that the coldly calculating part that handles signaling, pack rank, etc. That’s the real problem. Cutting it out of the picture in favor of the conscious mind is like the pinky finger demanding that the body be cut off.
Upvoted because I deliberatively judge that this should scare me, and yet I immediately recognize it as obviously true, and yet it does not really scare me, because nearly all of my emotion, motivation, and so forth are below the level where my deliberative judgement desperately cries that she should be in control of things.
nearly all of my emotion, motivation, and so forth are below the level where my deliberative judgement desperately cries that she should be in control of things.
The conscious mind finds itself riding an uncontrollable wild horse of emotions, and generally the success of a person in the real world will depend on the conscious mind’s ability to strategically place carrots in places such that the horse goes roughly the right way.
But, on the other hand, moral antirealism means that if the conscious mind did ever completely free itself from that wild horse, it would have only an extremely impoverished purpose in life, because rationality massively under-constrains behaviour in this morally relative existence.
The conscious mind finds itself riding an uncontrollable wild horse of emotions, and generally the success of a person in the real world will depend on the conscious mind’s ability to strategically place carrots in places such that the horse goes roughly the right way.
This is a very common view about the human mind, and I think it is a mistaken one. In most domains of daily life, the unconscious knows what it’s doing far better than the conscious mind; and since much of our conscious goals consist of signaling and ignore the many unconscious actions that keep them running, the conscious goals would probably be incoherent or awful for us if we genuinely pursued them in an expected-utility-maximizing fashion. Fortunately, it is impossible for us to do so by mere acts of will.
I instead hope to let my conscious thought model and understand the unconscious better, in order to point out some biases (which can be corrected for by habit or conscious effort or mind-hack) and to see if there are ways that both my conscious and unconscious minds can achieve their goals together rather than wasting energy in clashes. (So far I haven’t seen an unconscious goal that my conscious mind can’t stomach; it’s often just subgoals that call out for compromise and change.)
Also, there’s no hope of the conscious mind “freeing itself”, because it is not enough of an independent object to exist on its own.
IAWYC, but I want to add that the conscious mind has some strengths— like the ability to carefully verify logical arguments and calculate probabilities— which the unconscious mind doesn’t seem to do much of.
I’m not sure how to describe what actually happens in my mind at the times that I feel myself trying to follow my conscious priorities against some unconscious resistance, but the phenomenon seems to be as volitional as anything else I do, and so it seems reasonable to reflect on whether and when this “conscious override” is a good idea.
The unconscious mind is not some dark corner, it’s the vast majority of “you”. It’s what and who you are, all the time you’re not pointing your “Cartesian camcorder” at yourself. It’s the huge huge majority of your computing capacity, nearly all of your personality, nearly all of your motivation, emotion, and beneath that the coldly calculating part that handles signaling, pack rank, etc. That’s the real problem. Cutting it out of the picture in favor of the conscious mind is like the pinky finger demanding that the body be cut off.
Upvoted because I deliberatively judge that this should scare me, and yet I immediately recognize it as obviously true, and yet it does not really scare me, because nearly all of my emotion, motivation, and so forth are below the level where my deliberative judgement desperately cries that she should be in control of things.
The conscious mind finds itself riding an uncontrollable wild horse of emotions, and generally the success of a person in the real world will depend on the conscious mind’s ability to strategically place carrots in places such that the horse goes roughly the right way.
But, on the other hand, moral antirealism means that if the conscious mind did ever completely free itself from that wild horse, it would have only an extremely impoverished purpose in life, because rationality massively under-constrains behaviour in this morally relative existence.
This is a very common view about the human mind, and I think it is a mistaken one. In most domains of daily life, the unconscious knows what it’s doing far better than the conscious mind; and since much of our conscious goals consist of signaling and ignore the many unconscious actions that keep them running, the conscious goals would probably be incoherent or awful for us if we genuinely pursued them in an expected-utility-maximizing fashion. Fortunately, it is impossible for us to do so by mere acts of will.
I instead hope to let my conscious thought model and understand the unconscious better, in order to point out some biases (which can be corrected for by habit or conscious effort or mind-hack) and to see if there are ways that both my conscious and unconscious minds can achieve their goals together rather than wasting energy in clashes. (So far I haven’t seen an unconscious goal that my conscious mind can’t stomach; it’s often just subgoals that call out for compromise and change.)
Also, there’s no hope of the conscious mind “freeing itself”, because it is not enough of an independent object to exist on its own.
IAWYC, but I want to add that the conscious mind has some strengths— like the ability to carefully verify logical arguments and calculate probabilities— which the unconscious mind doesn’t seem to do much of.
I’m not sure how to describe what actually happens in my mind at the times that I feel myself trying to follow my conscious priorities against some unconscious resistance, but the phenomenon seems to be as volitional as anything else I do, and so it seems reasonable to reflect on whether and when this “conscious override” is a good idea.