You Are Your Unconscious
Stop othering your unconscious to develop an integrated mind
The conscious and the unconscious
I have come to the realization that we are framing the main problems about the mind — the problem of consciousness and the problem of free will — the wrong way.
We think that our subjective experience is all there is in the human mind when, in fact, it is only a small part of what goes on in the mind.
One of the silly things we hear said about consciousness is that it is an illusion. It is not; consciousness is real. What is an illusion is to consider it something separated from the rest of the mind, which is unconscious. When you look at the evidence, you realize that there is a fuzzy boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. One flows into the other continuously.
As Daniel Dennett argued in his book Consciousness Explained, whether you consider something that happens in your mind is conscious or unconscious depends on whether you are experiencing it now or trying to remember it later. Something that is clearly conscious now may seem unconscious later because you have forgotten about it.
In other words, we are conscious of things that are present in working memory — the desktop space in our mind where we…
