[ExI] unconscious

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Tue Jul 22 18:49:52 UTC 2014


When I do a crossword puzzle I seem to 'hear' my unconscious trying to tell
me something and if I get the right mind set it will pop up into
consciousness.  I do not have to make an effort to pull it up.  If you do
crosswords do you have the same feelings?

When I go searching for a memory and don't immediately get it, it may pop
up a bit later without any effort.  Do you go digging in your memory or
does it seem to come out from within, as if being pushed.  Pull or push?
​  I'd appreciate your feedback on this.​

Now we think of our thinking as all consciousness, but I think the
unconscious is thinking too but we don't know that (because it is
unconscious, duh).

Haidt, Kahnemann and others have warmed up Freud with their analogies of
the elephant and the rider, etc.  We conclude from them that most of what
goes
​on ​
in our thinking department is unconscious.

Many people on this chat list seem deeply concerned that our intelligence
in the future must be higher, as high as possible.  I wonder if simply
raising IQ through gengineering will do.

I propose that what we could work on is getting deeper and deeper into our
unconscious by making more and more of it conscious.
​(Through gengineering, certainly not psychoanalysis or any other such
thing.)

​
We know that the conscious, the rider, often jumps at conclusions,
stereotypes and more, all to get as quick an answer as possible, and thus
makes a lot of simple mistakes that presumably we would not make if we
tapped into the unconscious
​, such as judging people by a first and short impression​
.

When I wake up in the morning I keep my eyes closed and sometimes go back
to sleep but often just wait a few minutes before getting up.  Now I have
noticed that the moment I get up is not really planned (like "I am getting
up on the count of 3.")  My body moves out of bed in at unpredictable
time.  I am a bit surprised, that is, to find myself moving.  See if this
happens to you.  If it does then I say that our unconscious is moving us
out of bed for reasons of its own, such as the conscious thought of coffee,
in my case.
​  (Yeah, bladder too.)  A lot of what we do is not conscious and so we
often don't know what we are thinking or going to do until we think or do
it.​

I think a lot of cognitive biases could be fixed by making much of the
unconscious conscious, and we would end up being much more intelligent than
our IQ could account for.


​We will never be able to catch up to the computers in sheer speed.  Making
quantum leaps in creativity, however, is our bag and never will be theirs.

bill w

​
bill w
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