simont | (no subject)

Subconsciouses are amazing things.

Mine is astonishingly good at all sorts of stuff. It will frequently prompt me to do some moderately random thing, or to do something in a particular way, and it will later turn out that doing that had some fantastic consequence such as completely avoiding a potential large problem, even though that problem hadn't consciously crossed my mind at all at the time my subconscious prompted me to make the decision.

Sometimes this gets taken to extremes, and I find myself behaving strangely and apparently erratically for an hour at a time, and I'm consciously thinking the whole time ‘I shouldn't be behaving like this’ but I keep doing it nonetheless because the hunch is too strong, and about 24 hours later I suddenly realise that there was an incredibly good reason for me doing so which my subconscious didn't bother to explain to me.

It's an absolutely amazing achievement; a tour de force of prediction, pattern-spotting and (on occasion) pre-emptive tactical planning. It's a much better driver than I am and has saved my life at least once behind the wheel; it programs at least as well as I do when I'm consciously thinking about it; I rely on it implicitly in so many circumstances that I'm sure I'd be completely helpless if it were swapped with someone else's.

I just wish that, once in a while, it would SHOW ITS WORKING.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Amen. In spades. Sometimes I wish I could explain my reasoning beyond "my hindbrain doesn't like this"; my hindbrain quite often gets it right, but I can't consciously reason why.

It's a hunch, innit?

I found a year of paying a shrink gave me a much better comms line to my subconscious, but it still does utterly arbitrary things now and then that I have to puzzle out later :)

Interesting. I'd have thought a psych*ist[1] would mostly be useful for untangling any motivations that your subconscious might have which you might not share; i.e. when you and it are actually after different things. That's certainly the sort of thing the caricature shrink always seems to produce (suppressed hatred of parents, unconscious fear of music, unacknowledged desire to juggle live ocelots on a clifftop etc). In the sort of case I'm currently annoyed about, both it and I are in full agreement on what things are desirable, and my only annoyance is with its methods of getting there, in particular its Sherlock-Holmes-like refusal to explain its intentions until after it triumphantly produces its result.

I'd be quite surprised to hear that a psych*ist might be usefully able to, for example, allow me to get a closer look at how my subconscious thinks about software design. (If nothing else, I'd have thought it would require a psych*ist who was also an accomplished software engineer :-)

Have I greatly misunderstood the practice of psych*y?

[1] do I mean "psychologist" or "psychiatrist"? The latter sounds to me like someone you go to when you're actually ill, whereas the former sounds to me like someone who sits in a university and does research rather than consulting with patients. Neither sounds quite right in this case.

Oh... in that case I think you're using subconscious in rather a different sense to me. I mean it in the sense of my emotional reactions, which I see as the part of me that sets the goals my conscious mind then strives to achieve. I think you're using it to refer to the parts of your (originally conscious) thought processes which have become elided into "this is clearly the right answer" shorthands. I suspect that if you wanted to find out about that you'd need to look at the things you design and abstract from these concrete examples the general principles your mind is operating on. They will be there - you're not Captain Overview like I am, but your brain has the ability to create systems-for-understanding-with just the same as mine does.

I mean it in the sense of my emotional reactions, which I see as the part of me that sets the goals my conscious mind then strives to achieve. I think you're using it to refer to the parts of your (originally conscious) thought processes which have become elided into "this is clearly the right answer" shorthands.

I am, but on the other hand the more I inhabit my own brain the more I become convinced that the two parts of the brain you distinguish here are actually largely the same. Trauma, for example - now there's something which is obviously the province of a psychiatrist, and fairly clearly connected to the emotional-reactions concept you describe. You become traumatised when some really horrible thing happens to you in connection with <foo>, and thereafter you have trouble whenever you encounter <foo> because your subconscious has learned to associate <foo> with all manner of bad stuff. But the faculties required for it to learn and generate this behaviour are precisely the same as those required for it to learn to juggle, look three moves ahead in a chess game, solve Net puzzles with barely any conscious thought or stamp on the brake in a car at the first sign of danger. It's all just pattern-matching: picking a complex stimulus out of the surrounding context, recognising it to be similar to something we've seen before, and either suggesting the same response as worked last time, or suggesting avoiding the response that didn't.

the more I inhabit my own brain the more I become convinced that the two parts of the brain you distinguish here are actually largely the same

They may well be for you but they aren't for me in the slightest. There's my emotions and then there's my pattern-matching/learning brain, and while the pattern-matcher does feed data into my emotional brain, the emotional brain is very selective about what stimuli it pays any attention to and very slow to change its idea of preset patterns that absolutely need to be responded to, however different the current context is - all this cliched psychoanalysis stuff you hear about responding to people as if they're one of your parents is actually perfectly true, it's just that it only becomes a problem when you have duff parents!

I read in a New Scientist a while back that a lot of people think that consciousness is just post-rationalisation for the subconscious anyway. If you want to test this - try consciously predicting what you'll say next for a while.