By “the unconscious” I mean the mental operations we perform without getting internal mental feedback about the process of the operation.
That’s not very concrete. The most widely recognized extension of this part of reality is emotions we don’t understand the reasons for, along with other mysterious-by-default things like why we spend a long time mentally reviewing our stated positions. We can simply ask “Why do I feel that way, and why do I spend my time that way?” This question doesn’t require any mention of unconscious thinking, or thinking at all. At this state of knowledge, the answer could conceivably involve any number of mechanisms, and those mechanisms may not be mental.
But in my own attempts to answer these questions, the most efficient way to model the source of those things is actually to model them as a mind. (I say “efficient” to emphasize a goal of using the concept, but the model appears to be accurate as well.) By a “mind”, I mean something that has a model of the world, that takes in evidence it receives about that world, that performs a very great amount of inference on that model and evidence, and even undertakes strategic thinking in the attempt to reach goals. In other words, the answer to why we feel and do those things is that there’s a genuine optimization process there, and the feelings and actions are its output.
We receive the conclusions of this part of our thinking, but we don’t have feedback about the thoughts taking place there. The system-of-us does not receive as input the process of these thoughts, and this is what distinguishes conscious and UNconscious thinking.
By “the unconscious” I mean the mental operations we perform without getting internal mental feedback about the process of the operation.
That’s not very concrete. The most widely recognized extension of this part of reality is emotions we don’t understand the reasons for, along with other mysterious-by-default things like why we spend a long time mentally reviewing our stated positions. We can simply ask “Why do I feel that way, and why do I spend my time that way?” This question doesn’t require any mention of unconscious thinking, or thinking at all. At this state of knowledge, the answer could conceivably involve any number of mechanisms, and those mechanisms may not be mental.
But in my own attempts to answer these questions, the most efficient way to model the source of those things is actually to model them as a mind. (I say “efficient” to emphasize a goal of using the concept, but the model appears to be accurate as well.) By a “mind”, I mean something that has a model of the world, that takes in evidence it receives about that world, that performs a very great amount of inference on that model and evidence, and even undertakes strategic thinking in the attempt to reach goals. In other words, the answer to why we feel and do those things is that there’s a genuine optimization process there, and the feelings and actions are its output.
We receive the conclusions of this part of our thinking, but we don’t have feedback about the thoughts taking place there. The system-of-us does not receive as input the process of these thoughts, and this is what distinguishes conscious and UNconscious thinking.