@gpowerf

consciousness has nothing to do with seperation of conscious and subconscious mind IMO.

The separation just implies there two separate minds that communicate with each other but process and think independently.

Counsciousness itself, the idea of awareness. is just a myth.. something we use to call ourselves special.. I suspect if you could somehow directly ask the subconscious it would think it is conscious as well and have its own sense of identity and just as unaware it is a component in the whole as I am.

@freemo so the subconscious is a coprocessor of sorts to the conscious side? Interesting idea.

@gpowerf That is the way I expiernce it when i access it through medication yes...

Its this hyper OCD "consider everything" awareness that is just madly constantly going through ideas and refining them and improving them... the good ones creep up to my conscious mind.

@freemo I get it. I don't experience that, or I should say I don't consciously experience that :) maybe it is happening in the background and I don't know.

@gpowerf You wouldnt be aware of it unless you can reach a deep meditative state most people cant get to (takes a lot of practice).. but people capable of reaching this state all describe the same expiernce. So i am rather well convinced it is not just me.

@freemo I've had interesting meditative-like experiences, but I may write about them someday when I am ready. Not yet.

@john

I dont think we have good words to explain this, like that is certainly beyond conscious access, but its not what I think of when I think of the subconscious.

The subconscious is a part of my brain that seems to be seperate with its own thought patterns and processing. I can only access it with deep meditation... it feels like it has its own level of awareness and thought and is much like my conscious mind just seperate and compartmentalized and unfiltered (yes it would drive me mad).. but it is seperate from skills.. both my conscious and subconscious have access to the same skills, and that is where the skill processing takes place, on a base level abstracted away fromthe conscious and subconscious minds themselves.

@freemo I don't think that sort of unconscious is actually very different from many things we do, like motor control, which is mostly unconscious, but can be made conscious with some effort.

Most vertebrates seem to have a mode of normal locomotion (which is probably unconscious), and controlled motion when trying something novel or difficult. What's the difference? I'd say it's bringing in some sort of executive (conscious?) control.

@john

I think we are talking about different types of subconscious and using the word different..

You are using subconscious to mean "everything we are unaware of". I am using it to mean "a seperate active thinking but compartmentalized entity in our head". It would likely have awareness much like the part that we call "us" is aware.

@freemo I'm saying there isn't a fundamental difference between the the thing's you're drawing a distinction between, in relation to conscious thought.

@john Right, and I guess i am saying I disagree... your motor functions dont have creative active thought that is then presented to the conscious mind for consideration.. the skills obviously can autonomously process but they wont actively go off and create complicated ideas on their own.

this can be seen

@Dogzilla

In my own model of how the mind works there is no consciousness, that is just a fictional term we use to feel special... The sense of self-awareness we have, is likely a sense our subconscious has as well, its just seperate from us. We have two parts that likely see themselves as self-aware in our heads... but its not remotely improtant if they are self aware so much as the fact that they are somewhat independent and can hold thoughts and ideas seperately.

@freemo Sounds reasonable, but by “clear definition” I mean non-subjective, repeatable and useable for objective measurements.

As an aside, we also desperately need this for creating frameworks to properly manage the rapidly-evolving AI landscape.

@Dogzilla Right and what I am saying is that the word doesnt need to be defined as we arent using it here at all, and ultimately is probably a word we should avoid since it has no meaning to an outsider, it only has meaning to us within our internal head space.

@freemo I’m not sure I understand. If the difference between humans and animals is a separation between the conscious and the unconscious, how can a definition of those terms not be central?

@Dogzilla

A definition of the conscious and subconscious mind **is** central... a definition of consciousness is not ..

whether the conscious or subconscious mind pocess consciousness is not relevant to identifying them.

@freemo Ah, I see what you’re saying, but I’m not sure that sidesteps the need for a definition of consciousness. How do you determine the separation of conscious and subconscious mind without it?

@Dogzilla

Assuming we dont bother trying to get a technical definition for a moment and just accept it as what you are expierncing as awareness.. I would argue both the conscious and subconscious mind has consciousness separately. In that my subconscious is only hidden from me, and I am likely hidden from it.

@freemo Apologies, but I can’t contribute to this discussion while lacking a hard definition. IMHO, that moves the discussion from science to philosophy, which I’m not well-versed in enough to offer anything more than wild-assed guesses.

@Dogzilla

Not sure why we need a definition for a word that doesnt play a role... Whether either of these two independent minds are conscious or not is not part of the discussion.. It is about if animal minds are compartmentalized or not.

@freemo Maybe I missed something - what exactly are you proposing as “these two independent minds”? Why do you propose there are two entities in animal minds instead of one? Why not 0 entities or 20 entities?

@Dogzilla

I am proposing as these two independent minds where one is the one that is in direct control of things like speech, its the one I am talking to right now... a second one only interacts with this "primary" mind. It acts by frantically coming up with countless ideas and the ones which it determines is most important it presses upon the primary mind and passes that information along to it.

Both of these minds are compartmentalized in that they think independently.

The hypothesis is not that animals have two minds, humans do.. Other animals may either have a very reduced primary mind, or may just have 1, or 0.. but the hypothesis is that it is effectively one less than humans.

@freemo Ok, that’s something I can wrap my head around. Would calling the “direct control” part the executive function make sense?

Assuming that’s the case, then we would try to find examples of executive function in animals to disprove the hypothesis. Working along that path, would you say dogs have executive function? What about squirrels? Oysters? Bees? A beehive, collectively?

I would suggest this is a spectrum - some animals have it, some don’t, some do when working collectively.

other primates can acquire language. so can other non-primates. we're not that special. even some brainless creatures have shown the ability to learn and override so-called instinctive behaviors

@lxo Im not suggesting language or learning are what make us unique. I am suggesting have a subconscious mind does make us specialhowever.. and by that i dont mean "instincts" I mean a seperate compartmentalized brain capable of independent thought.

it still strikes me as extraordinary that any such major thing as a "subconscious mind" would arise fully formed in any evolutionary path. it would take extraordinary evidence to support such a theory, and one of the building blocks would be showing that neighboring species don't carry that trait. I guess that would be enough to disprove it, because once we start looking for that (I mean you and I, not science in general, that must have been looking into that for a long time), we'll surely find plenty of evidence of incremental evolution of this trait, just like of pretty much every other trait we observe in humans.

@lxo I can only speculate on if other species have the trait... it would be hard to investigate.

That said I have far more certainty about the two-minds idea being true for humans, the only part I cant be certain about is if it is unique to us.

you're certainly on to something with that intuition, that I've long shared. but it's also a lot more complicated than that IMHO. one the one hand, it's more likely multiple rather than two; on the other, they're probably so intricately intertwined that one may easily perceive them as one. it's not at all unusual for control systems to have opposite forces balancing each other towards a desired equilibrium. lots of dimensions for impulse vs suppression. consider a hungry animal watching another larger animal eating, trying to find the right moment in which going for the remnants won't turn itself into food right away. consider the conflict between the impulse to breath while underwater, vs the awareness and other perceptions that you are underwater and breathing there is not such a great idea, and then the further overrider on top of that out of the awareness and understanding that, despite feeling under water, seeing water all around, it's still safe to breathe because you know there's a air supply. layers and layers and layers of impulse and suppression piled on and on over billions of years of evolution got us this. I can't seriously consider the notion that this only came up a couple of million years ago.

@lxo

I can both see and interact with mine, anyone who can reach a deep meditative state has expiernced it.

It is fromt his expiernce, and sharing it with others capable of reaching the mental state, it seems clear to me that there is one other such second mind, and that we interact with it. Since this other mind and my own see eachother as seperate (or atleast I see it as seperate) it seems clear to me they are not perceived as one, once one is able to "see" it at all (normally you arent aware of it, in which case I suppose you can say they are seen as one during normal operations :) )

look, I'm not disputing this second mind you perceive, I'm rather corroborating it. I myself have this superpower of offloading problem solving to an intuitive unconscious co-processor that has given me pretty good solutions (and lots of anxiety, as I have no insight into its progress before it gives me an answer, that may or may not be 42 ;-) but in order to function, it requires me not to focus my conscious mind into demanding tasks. whether that means they're sharing the same computing resources, or just that other demanding tasks would draw the intuitive mind's attention, is not known to me. I also need distraction, say, a TV or radio producing background noise that I don't even notice, to be able to fully focus my conscious mind, as if there was some part of my mind that, if not given this distraction, would disrupt the part that is trying to focus on something. it's truly fascinating.
the fable of the struggle between two wolves inside us all is more supporting evidence of our having more than one mind. but why stop at two? we run strange loops in our minds that stand for our models of others' minds, and some even have multiple personalities, in which multiple separate minds seem to inhabit the same brain. IIRC both hoffstadter and damasio perceive some link between the self-referential nature of the mind, with multiple layers of feedback loops, with this explosion of possibilities and complexities

I'm reminded of some interesting books by Antonio Damasio that I read long ago, that seem apropos and that have certainly influenced my views on the matters under discussion in this thread: "Self comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain", and "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain"

@mian I dont use language in my conscious brain all the time... so im not sure I agree, my conscious brain is quite rich in non-verbal expression and the only time i use words is if i am trying to construct a conversation.

@freemo I think that even non-verbal expression that has a sort of if-this-then-that or a story is still language.

@mian Much of my internal land scape isnt limited to conditional logic either. For example much of it is a visual landscape which i manipulate (graphs are common)

@freemo Manipulating something and imagining a result fits pretty neatly into conditional logic really.

@freemo But then I think it's pretty clear that octopuses simulate what would happen if different actions are taken.

@mian yes octopussies ( :) ) certainly plan things before acting in some sense.