I'd say it's definitely real, and very potent. (My guess is that it's the main driver of most mental health issues.) You can't possibly hold everything you know in conscious awareness all at once. Memories and beliefs are stored somewhere, and are constantly interacting with and affecting our immediate experience.

Dreams would seem to be another indicator of its existence. Despite a person being unconscious, the brain continues to work, producing seemingly random but in some way meaningful movies. If it affects our sleeping state, there's a pretty good chance it affects our waking state as well.

Would you agree that the unconscious is made up of signifiers? That it's basically linguistically structured?

Do you pay attention to slips of the tongue?

@Mongrel I would say it's composed of remembered words, images, and to some extent feelings/emotions. To that I would probably add the combination of those items as remembered experiences. Pretty much whatever you can recall consciously if prompted, plus vestiges of things all but forgotten.

As for slips of the tongue, they are probably indicative of things that are near the top of your unconscious thoughts. For example, when you accidentally call your current partner by your ex-partner's name. :-O

There certainly appears to be something there which had been called the unconscious but other names as well. It is a type of memory that influences and manifests in various forms. Conscious memory seems to be awaken by some experience that is so closely related to a previous memory that we sense it once again, and it also provokes a response. Unconscious memory seems to influence in a different manner.

here certainly appears to be something there which had been called the unconscious but other names as well. — Rich

What other names?

Is the unconscious a myth? — Mongrel

I don't see how it could possibly be. Quite apart from psycho-analytic theories, it is a physiological fact that many of the regulatory, hormonal, and autonomic somatic processes are not available to conscious introspection, yet constantly shape experience and behaviour. There are any number of experiments showing how various stimuli or influences or causal agents can influence your responses along a number of axes without you're being conscious of them. Even if a subject has a neuronal abnormality, such as a developing tumour, which might cause behavioural changes, then that is an unconscious determinant of behaviours.

Then there's the whole gamut of psychoanalytic interpretations of the unconscious. Even though this customarily is said to have been 'discovered' by Freud, there are many historical precedents, in a similar way to there having been historical precedents to the idea of biological evolution (indeed, Wikipedia tells me the word itself was coined by Schelling, and surely is basic to Schopenhauer's philosophy). But Freud crystallised a lot of that understanding or at least gave it a kind of scientific footing.

I have noticed in my interactions on forums, that diehard materialists invariably reject the notion of the unconscious. However, I don't think they're really cognisant of their own reasons for so doing. ;-)

(Check out this title).

A better neuroscientific division than conscious vs unconscious is attentional vs habitual. And in humans, both would have then have the extra feature of being linguistically structured.

So an important point is that habit and attention operate on different timescales - a fifth of a second vs half a second. And connected to that, all clear thoughts have to start out vague and tentative, becoming focused and strongly conscious by neural competition and selective attention - unless they are, by exact contrast, highly routinised thoughts that can be emitted "without thought" as rapid habits.

So what we are dealing with here is a natural dichotomy of brain activity towards either dealing with life in a rapid, learnt, unthinking way, or a more deliberative, attentive, and learning way. And this is a dynamical balancing act. We have to be doing both at once all the time.

If you apply this neurological model to Freudian slips for example, you can see that speech acts have to bubble up from vague beginnings where there is some general intended thought to be expressed, but multiple choices about how to turn that into an articulated sentence. So the brain has to be in a state of competition where many things could be said - including stuff you don't want to say, or stuff vaguely associated - and all that possibility has to be suppressed just to let some actual formula of words win through to be said.

Nothing nefarious is going on when slips occur. It just reflects the fact that thought has to start with a net cast wide, then speech itself forces a dramatic narrowing of possible sayings to arrive at a string of particular words that then count as what you wanted to say.

And the timing comes into it because you can be conscious of your general intended speech act, but stringing the actual words together happens at subconscious speeds. So it is only after the final speaking you discover how this little process of competitive filtering played out.

So my complaint against Freudian style views is that they kind of paint a picture of two kinds of selves in competition - like the instinctual id and socially constrained super ego. It is a one dimensional tale of repression and betrayal.

But while competition definitely exists, the ability to smoothly integrate the various levels of processing is what is more relevant to an understanding of brain function. The neural architecture may be founded on dichotomies. But the dynamics are then about the fruitful integration of the useful division of labour.

The idea of being at secret war with your own self is a nice romantic myth. It speaks to the real fact of division. But what completes the story of the self is focusing on its actual goal of arriving at an integrated and adaptive state of understanding and action. The unconscious then becomes, in this light, all the dynamic and lively variety that has become constrained for just a moment to form the highly focal state of mind we happen to be in right now, at this time, for some good reason.

I have noticed in my interactions on forums, that diehard materialists invariably reject the notion of the unconscious. However, I don't think they're really cognisant of their own reasons for so doing. — Wayfarer

What are their reasons?

Even if a subject has a neuronal abnormality, such as a developing tumour, which might cause behavioural changes, then that is an unconscious determinant of behaviours. — Wayfarer

But it is also pretty materialist to be seeking the hidden subconscious determinants of behaviour. Freud's own model is straight out of the industrial era with its hydraulic steam engine metaphors. Watch out, that thar id is a pressure about to blow! Got to protect the ego system by finding harmless release in Freudian slips!

So that is why I would stress flipping the story. The unconscious is just that dynamical vague mass of everything we might ever think or do. Then the moment to moment consciousness is what becomes our usefully adapted state having constrained all the meaningless variety to form some fleetingly useful mental picture.

The determination of the indeterminate is a top down thing. We are actually in control in the sense that the evolution of a state of mind is holistically organised via a competivite process, a generalised filtering.

So to escape materialism - the standard bottom up story - it is important not to try to pin the blame on our instinctual animal id. That itself is a romantic myth by which society - as a higher scale of mind - is seeking to regulate or constrain individual humans in a holistic and top down fashion.

At least Freud got he super ego story right. But he was essentially speaking to materialist science and romantic ideology.

hey, apo's back, nice

it is also pretty materialist to be seeking the hidden subconscious determinants of behaviour — apokrisis

I don't think so. I think the interpretation you're referring to - the 'instinctive animal ID' - is only one aspect of the story. And indeed, Freud was materialist - but Jung wasn't, and I think Jung's development of 'the unconscious' was far more culturally significant than Freud (even though Jung is generally deprecated by mainstream culture nowadays.)

Furthermore, I see the Jungian idea of archetypes as being related to the Platonic eidos, as 'forms' which represent universals or types.

But the salient point, is to become conscious of the unconscious - to be able to intuit the contents of the unconscious, which is an essential step in the process of liberation. We have to learn to navigate and plumb the depths of the unconscious. That is why I referred to James Hillman's book in my response to Mongrel.

I have noticed in my interactions on forums, that diehard materialists invariably reject the notion of the unconscious. However, I don't think they're really cognisant of their own reasons for so doing.
— Wayfarer

What are their reasons? — praxis

I think 'the unconscious' sits uneasily with any form of reductionism, for the obvious reason that it is kind of occult, a 'hidden reality'.

Adler and Jung developed their own description of mind and consciousness which is entirely different from the their teacher Freud. I myself and Bergson consider the unconscious just a form of memory. I would put reflex actions and instinctual reactions in the same category. So there are many ways to refer to this phenomenon.

But you've changed the subject by bringing in Jung. At least Freud was trying to be materialistic and scientific. Now you are appealing to the supernatural. And that is just peddling the romantic myth of the wrongfully constrained human individual from a flakier ontological basis. Instead of Freud's naturalist story of a secret driver of conscious action, you have shifted to a secret supernatural driver of natural action in general.

So you are again recognising a division, but then jumping to a transcendent ontology which puts the second source of action outside the level of action to be explained. It is not the integrated view I am taking. Holism is about immanence. It is about the two way interaction that can result because there is a symmetry breaking or dichotomy that forms, allowing the third thing of dynamical integration.

I myself and Bergson consider the unconscious just a form of memory. — Rich

Memory is a better way to look at it. But also everything about the brain is memory.

A snappy way of putting it is that the unconscious or habitual part of brain activity could be called a memory of what can be forgotten, while the conscious or attentional part is our memory of the future.

What I mean is that we form a machinery of adaptive habits by learning what to ignore about the world. We learn what we can afford to forget to make things happen in a way that demands least conscious attention.

And then attention is about noticing what predicts the near future. It is forming the mental picture of what counts and needs to guide our coming behaviour. So it is a (working) memory of the expectable future.

So the unconscious is everything that at the moment we can afford to forget about. The conscious is everything we need to be remembering as context for the moment we are going through so as to smoothly integrate ourselves in the world just about to happen.

The two faces of what we call the faculty of memory. And what people typically think of as memory - recall of past events - is the linguistically structured art of talking ourselves back in time, imagining or recreating an anticipatory image of what it would be like to be back in some moment, doing the Janus thing of ignoring as much as possible via habit, forming a working memory as context for some next moment.

damn it's been too long since I've heard the word symmetry, I had no idea how much I needed it until now

hey, apo's back, nice — darthbarracuda

Yeah, seems like he knows some stuff. Maybe he can help us out in the 'Implications of Evolution' thread...? @apokrisis

yeah probably he's smart af when it comes to biology

But you've changed the subject by bringing in Jung. — apokrisis

I didn't 'change the subject'. The subject is the unconscious, and Jung was one of the foremost commentators on that very subject in the 20th century. But then of course your animus against anything you deem 'supernatural' - which is a whole heap of stuff - gets activated.

Holism is about immanence — apokrisis

Which is a roundabout way of saying, everything has to be explicable naturalistically, otherwise it's 'superstitious', isn't it?

What are their reasons? — praxis

Note the above.

Yes, I do see appeals to the supernatural as ontologically vacuous. Transcendence can't work as causal explanation. So I am happy starting with a rational position. Holism has to be about immanence - system style causality.

I don't think I've ever been roundabout on the point. :)

Thanks. My background is in neuroscience and theoretical biology. But that thread is many pages long.

A brief answer is that biologists now understand life as a manifestation of the laws of thermodynamics. So evolution (and progress) would now be placed securely on that particular branch of physics. Life exists to accelerate the entropification of the universe.

This naturalises life, giving it a purpose. The universe wants something. Life arises not as some wild accident but because it is the kind of complex, energy dissipating, heat producing, process that is meant to be.

This is a big change from the old Darwinian mechanical picture. And the same ontological shift is happening in physics too. The universe itself is a Big Bang, etc. Existence is the evolution of maximalised simplicity - the search for a physical heat death.

Then life and mind arise as the fleetingly complex structure which help with this generalised cause. Where there are undissipated energy stores, we insert ourselves as structure that finds clever ways to dissipate it to waste heat.

So one general physical imperative to rule them all.

Scientific American: A New Physics Theory of Life

A better neuroscientific division than conscious vs unconscious is attentional vs habitual...
So what we are dealing with here is a natural dichotomy of brain activity towards either dealing with life in a rapid, learnt, unthinking way, or a more deliberative, attentive, and learning way. And this is a dynamical balancing act. We have to be doing both at once all the time. — Apokrisis

Neuroscience explains neurophysiology. Neurophysiology is correlated with, but insufficient to explain, psychological functions. Consciousness is a property of a whole human being (comprising body and mind), not of human brains.

Since the terms "conscious" and "unconscious" are familiar to, and used by, neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists, I see no reason to confuse the issue by replacing them with the terms "attention" and "habit" (which pertain to entirely different psychological phenomena). To make sense, that would be a metaphorical use of terms, hence; a category error.

Also, I have never liked the terms "subconscious" and "unconscious", finding them inadequate to the task of categorising psychological functions with respect to semantic information processing.
I would prefer to replace them with the terms "semi-conscious" and "non-conscious" (which are at least cognate). These, together with the term "conscious", seem to comprehend mind-body conditions which can be observed in the behaviour of others, and entail variations in awareness and responsiveness which can be measured.

The mind is variably aware, and the body is variably responsive, to wit:
1) Consciousness is a conscious condition, and to be conscious is to be fully aware and fully responsive.
2) Semi-Consciousness is a semi-conscious condition, and to be semi-conscious is to be partially aware and partially responsive.
3) Non-Consciousness is a non-conscious condition, and to be non-conscious is to be unaware and unresponsive.

Cognitive Psychology has long recognised the dual aspect of semantic information processing, whether it be termed:
1) Horizontal and Vertical
2) Controlled and Automatic
3) Slow and Fast
4) Serial and Parallel, or
5) Explicit and Implicit, etc.

Descriptions of consciousness and semi-consciousness correspond with descriptions of controlled and automatic processing, respectively. The nature and extent of the relations between types of consciousness and psychological functions remain to be fully discovered and explained.

Some, if not many, functions exhibit characteristics of both types of processing, sometimes switching seamlessly between them (e.g., problem solving). Attention is variously described as Global (Broad), Local (Narrow), Intentional (Active) Selection, and Automatic (Passive) Selection. There are other examples.

So, besides the two types of processing noted, could there be a third type which combines these two in serial (switched), or parallel (simultaneous), operation (otherwise known as ordinary fluctuations in consciousness)? Or even a fourth type which involves non-conscious processing (either independent of, or in combination with, conscious and semi-conscious processing)?

Is the unconscious a myth? — Mongrel

Only if other people are a myth, such as those:
1) suffering from certain forms of brain damage, epilepsy, akinetic mutism, delirium, traumatic experience, and psychosis.
2) who are in pharmacologically induced, minimally conscious, or persistent vegetative, states, or chronic coma.
3) who have been anaesthetised.

It would be more productive to ask: what types of semantic information do people in these conditions process?

From probability to certainty. That's fantastic. How does that bear on design argument for God?

So speaking neurological, what actually is going on when you are conscious vs "semi-conscious"? What's your model in terms of actual brain processes?

That's the advantage of talking instead about attention and habit. We know how both work and how they functionally relate. It's not handwaving.

Cognitive Psychology has long recognised the dual aspect of semantic information processing, whether it be termed:
1) Horizontal and Vertical
2) Controlled and Automatic
3) Slow and Fast
4) Serial and Parallel, or
5) Explicit and Implicit, etc.

Descriptions of consciousness and semi-consciousness correspond with descriptions of controlled and automatic processing, respectively. The nature and extent of the relations between types of consciousness and psychological functions remain to be fully discovered and explained. — Galuchat

This only describes one aspect of consciousness, the willful part. It does not describe the creative aspect (intuition) nor does it describe the habitual aspect. The former being by far the most important since it is fundamental to existence, to create. The willful aspect provides the ability to create. Habits, allow the body to persist and extend throughout the body.

I don't explain neurophysiology, but I would be interested in reading an explanation of "attention" and "habit" written in strictly neurophysiological terms.

There you go. It was fact free waffle.

I don't explain neurophysiology, but I would be interested in reading an explanation of "attention" and "habit" written in strictly neurophysiological terms. — Galuchat

There you go. It was fact free waffle. — Apokrisis

If you've written five books on neuroscience, it shouldn't be a difficult thing to provide the requested explanation. Or just give me the titles, I'll purchase them myself, and look for the answer (assuming your books have been published).

PMed.

PMed. — Apokrisis

Your desire for anonymity will be respected.
Thanks for providing the title of a book which is actually sold by Amazon (presumably written by yourself).

Having read the reviews of this, and your other titles (as listed on Amazon), it is obvious that you are a well-read science writer, and that you are not a neuroscientist. In fact, Amazon describes you as a journalist and author.

None of these titles would be considered to be a textbook on neuroscience. I could spend £2.19 to purchase the title you recommended, but I suspect (and you know) that it doesn't contain an explanation of "attention" and "habit" written strictly in neurophysiological terms. Please ask one of your neuroscience contacts to write one for you. Thanks in advance.