There are many reasons to expect that the non-conscious part of the mind is largely arational, in the LW senses of rationality. My impression is that it seems to operate mostly on trained responses and associative connections/pattern matching, mediated by emotional responses. In practice this means it can often actually be more rational in certain ways than the conscious mind, because it seems to be better at collecting and correlating information, cf. people who have a non-rational aversion to certain foods for reasons they don’t consciously understand, then years later discover they’re actually allergic to it.
I expect the better approach would be to deliberately train the non-conscious mind to use associations and heuristics derived by the rational conscious mind, and I mean “train” in the sense of “training a dog”.
Any sort of high-level self-monitoring is probably beyond its capabilities, though perhaps recognizing warning signs and alerting the conscious mind would work. Some sort of “panic on unexpected input” type heuristic, I guess.
There are many reasons to expect that the non-conscious part of the mind is largely arational, in the LW senses of rationality. My impression is that it seems to operate mostly on trained responses and associative connections/pattern matching, mediated by emotional responses. In practice this means it can often actually be more rational in certain ways than the conscious mind, because it seems to be better at collecting and correlating information, cf. people who have a non-rational aversion to certain foods for reasons they don’t consciously understand, then years later discover they’re actually allergic to it.
I expect the better approach would be to deliberately train the non-conscious mind to use associations and heuristics derived by the rational conscious mind, and I mean “train” in the sense of “training a dog”.
Any sort of high-level self-monitoring is probably beyond its capabilities, though perhaps recognizing warning signs and alerting the conscious mind would work. Some sort of “panic on unexpected input” type heuristic, I guess.