“My thoughts, not to mention these words I am typing, are effortless and immediate, and so allied with the conscious faction of my mind. We intend to respect that alliance by believing that the conscious mind is the best, and by trying to convince you of this as well.”
I’m not at all sure conscious/unconscious is good terminology to use here.
For one, there isn’t a single unified unconscious, but a vast array of different not-consciously-accessible modules. Neither is there a single unified consciousness, for that matter. A module can be either conscious or unconscious, depending on whether it happens to be active at the moment in question. Trivial examples: depending on whether you happen to be paying attention to your own thoughts or the external world, objects in your visual field may or may not be conscious. Things like annoyance towards something that somebody did may be either active and conscious (when you’re annoyed with them in general), or dormant and unconscious (when you’re mostly thinking of how great they are). Various desires or wants may be tugging at you at an unconscious level until they reach a conscious level, and so on.
Furthermore, there’s the fact that all the processes that actually select the thoughts that are promoted to conscious awareness are themselves unconscious. All the skills you might employ on to make your decisions are sufficeintly automated that they for the most part operate on an unconscious level, only returning you the results of their analyses. The parts of your knowledge store that are activated and tagged as relevant for this task are again chosen by unconscious processes. Et cetera, et cetera.
You could try to use the phrase “allied with your consciousness” here, to include the parts of your unconscious that are helping out your consciousness… but then again, which consciousness? Consciousness is just a generic label for the modules and processes that happen to be active “in a conscious manner” at a certain point of time. And don’t forget that we employ different kinds of processing depending on our mood, too.
There’s also the problem that for e.g. our consciously held ethics are just an imperfect model built on the intuitive moral judgments our unconscious outputs. Our conscious mind observes some of its own reactions to something, postulates some formal ethical principles and tries them out, until eventually some annoying philosopher comes up with something like the Repugnant Conclusion. Then our unconscious outputs a negative reaction, showing our ethics wasn’t good enough after all, and then we seek to rationalize this judgment with a revamped ethical system. In other words, our unconscious knows our ethics better than our conscious mind does: our conscious mind is just making guesses based on what the unconscious mind says. (Or to be more specific, unconscious processes generate guesses, some of which are given to our conscious mind to evaluate.) Yes, occasionally the conscious mind says something like “my version is better, shut up”, but often we do end up accepting the judgment of the unconscious mind.
I think I generally agree with your points, but I’m wondering if you think that ego syntonic and ego dystonic are binary categories, or a continuum.
The later seems obviously true to me. There are some desires I have that are so ego-dystonic that I would never, ever want to act on them, like my desire to punch someone who outbid me on eBay. But there are many other desires I have that are only ego dystonic because they interfere with some even more important desire I have. For instance, my desire to read TV Tropes might be ego dystonic when I need to prepare for a job interview, but then magically become ego syntonic once I’ve finished the interview and need to unwind.
In fact, I think a great many of the ego-dystonic things that you describe as interfering with our real goals would stop being ego dystonic if we achieved those goals more frequently.
I’m not at all sure conscious/unconscious is good terminology to use here.
For one, there isn’t a single unified unconscious, but a vast array of different not-consciously-accessible modules. Neither is there a single unified consciousness, for that matter. A module can be either conscious or unconscious, depending on whether it happens to be active at the moment in question. Trivial examples: depending on whether you happen to be paying attention to your own thoughts or the external world, objects in your visual field may or may not be conscious. Things like annoyance towards something that somebody did may be either active and conscious (when you’re annoyed with them in general), or dormant and unconscious (when you’re mostly thinking of how great they are). Various desires or wants may be tugging at you at an unconscious level until they reach a conscious level, and so on.
Furthermore, there’s the fact that all the processes that actually select the thoughts that are promoted to conscious awareness are themselves unconscious. All the skills you might employ on to make your decisions are sufficeintly automated that they for the most part operate on an unconscious level, only returning you the results of their analyses. The parts of your knowledge store that are activated and tagged as relevant for this task are again chosen by unconscious processes. Et cetera, et cetera.
You could try to use the phrase “allied with your consciousness” here, to include the parts of your unconscious that are helping out your consciousness… but then again, which consciousness? Consciousness is just a generic label for the modules and processes that happen to be active “in a conscious manner” at a certain point of time. And don’t forget that we employ different kinds of processing depending on our mood, too.
There’s also the problem that for e.g. our consciously held ethics are just an imperfect model built on the intuitive moral judgments our unconscious outputs. Our conscious mind observes some of its own reactions to something, postulates some formal ethical principles and tries them out, until eventually some annoying philosopher comes up with something like the Repugnant Conclusion. Then our unconscious outputs a negative reaction, showing our ethics wasn’t good enough after all, and then we seek to rationalize this judgment with a revamped ethical system. In other words, our unconscious knows our ethics better than our conscious mind does: our conscious mind is just making guesses based on what the unconscious mind says. (Or to be more specific, unconscious processes generate guesses, some of which are given to our conscious mind to evaluate.) Yes, occasionally the conscious mind says something like “my version is better, shut up”, but often we do end up accepting the judgment of the unconscious mind.
I agree with you about terminology. Ego syntonic vs. ego dystonic desires is probably a better way to put it.
I think I generally agree with your points, but I’m wondering if you think that ego syntonic and ego dystonic are binary categories, or a continuum.
The later seems obviously true to me. There are some desires I have that are so ego-dystonic that I would never, ever want to act on them, like my desire to punch someone who outbid me on eBay. But there are many other desires I have that are only ego dystonic because they interfere with some even more important desire I have. For instance, my desire to read TV Tropes might be ego dystonic when I need to prepare for a job interview, but then magically become ego syntonic once I’ve finished the interview and need to unwind.
In fact, I think a great many of the ego-dystonic things that you describe as interfering with our real goals would stop being ego dystonic if we achieved those goals more frequently.