[ExI] unconscious

[Ben]

William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:

 >... most of what goes on in our thinking department is unconscious.

Of course, by necessity.  That's just a consequence of the way our minds 
work.
I suspect that it's a situation analogous to the patterns that sunflower 
seeds form in the seed-head.  If that represents the conscious mind, the 
rest of the sunflower, and probably a lot of its environment too, 
represent the unconscious.  You can't have the patterns without the rest.


 >
 >I propose that what we could work on is getting deeper and deeper into our
 >unconscious by making more and more of it conscious.

I doubt that makes any more sense than trying to make the rest of a 
sunflower form the same patterns as the seeds.  Giving our conscious 
minds /access/ to our unconscious processes, though, is a different 
matter.  That's probably possible, and may even be a good idea.


 >
 >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

How do you think the conscious mind does this 'jumping to conclusions'?  
These cognitive shortcuts are produced by the unconcious mind.  Gut 
instinct, intuitions, whatever you want to call them, are not products 
of conscious thinking.


 >?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.

Why the 'us' and 'them'?  We are computers, too.  Look at where the word 
came from.  Our current traditional digital computers are just using a 
different set of mechanisms to process data than the ones our brains 
use.  There must be many other sets, that we haven't yet explored.  Some 
of them should be capable of producing fast, creative, conscious minds, 
don't you think?  (there's also the fact that a Turing Machine is 
capable in principle of reproducing any data processing mechanism, but 
that's not something a lot of people like to think about, and isn't 
really necessary, anyway, I reckon).


Ben Zaiboc