@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

@lxo Sounds like we mostly agree then :) I too have noticed that "super power"

yeah, we agree as to the existence of such things, but not about its uniqueness, both WRT species (or even genus), and WRT individuals
part of the complication is the separation between brain and mind; another part is that we can look at things in different scales, and they may seem inexplicably different at different scales (hoffstadter has great imagery about that), but my earlier point about multiplicity/uniqueness hinges a bit on these issues. different parts of our brains have different specializations, so it might be defensible to qualify them as separate organs, or as a single organ with different parts, just as we can look at our bodies and perceive different organs or a single organism. analogously, minds can probably be decomposed into, erhm, components, that may operate jointly or independently, and be perceived as separate entities or as a single entity, depending on scale and perceptions. hoffstadter also offers some an interesting thought experiment about a mind physically separated from the body, but still controlling it remotely, and then (spoiler follows) cloned exactly, and how they both remain one and the same, operating in perfect unison, until they perceive themselves as separate minds, at which point they diverge and start struggling against each other for exclusive control over the body. I find that experiment fascinating.

ugh, typo alert: by hoffstadter, I meant douglas r. hofstadter, of "gödel, escher, bach", "metamagical themes", "the mind's I", and other delightful reads, some of which have become videos

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"