onifre writes:
But there is no conscious mind -vs- unconscious mind, there is only the mind. And if we are being specific in our use of terms, the"mind" is consciousness.
In a way, I think this brings us to a fairly crucial point in our grasp of the terminology. What is "consciousness"? That is the billion-dollar question...
... and I sometimes wonder whether that amount would represent money well spent. (What I mean is, it would be easy to spend that amount of money investigating the question -- indeed perhaps that amount has already been spent -- without producing an answer that has commensurate value.) For more on that, you might be interested in an article that showed up at eSkeptic a couple years ago:
Consciousness is Nothing but a Word
I really appreciate the behavioral distinction that Rahvin is describing, but I think the terms "conscious" and "subconscious" are making it more complicated than it needs to be (at least for you, onifre, and probably for others). Perhaps it would be better to use other terms instead. Maybe "reactive" versus "constructive", in the following sense:
The kind of behavior Rahvin labels as "subconscious" is (according to his description) a matter of direct stimulus/response, or action/reaction; events or conditions in the environment impinge on the senses of an organism, and the organism behaves accordingly based solely on the resources and repertoires available to it at that moment -- what humans do in this regard differs from what other primates do only to the extent that humans have an intrinsically wider repertoire of behaviors at their disposal, and a much larger pool of internally available resources (in the form of recallable experience or knowledge). {AbE: And these days, "available resources" increasingly include devices that are only "external" in a strictly biological sense: cell phones and portable computers, and their associated "apps" like twitter, are increasingly pervasive components in our "reactive" repertoires, hence the frequent observation of "viral" internet activity.}
(This is a little different from nlerd's notion of "subconscious", which in itself is also a useful concept to keep track of: the ability to "program" the sensory-motor nervous system for a wide range of "packaged" behaviors -- typing or playing piano without looking at the keys, driving while conversing or thinking about dinner, and so on. When you consider how these behaviors actually allow adaptive interventions -- like speaking while you have something in your mouth -- the subtlety of the overall system is really astonishing.)
In contrast, the behavior being labeled as "conscious" is a matter of withholding or deferring immediate reactions, so that additional resources can be brought to bear on building up a more careful, "constructed" response to a given event or condition. There seems to be something here that relates directly to Freud's sense of "id" vs. "ego", or immediacy vs. repression of impulses, so maybe Rahvin's terms are in fact quite apt (even though they carry a lot of baggage that tends to confuse people).
I think I'll stop there. This is some deep s**t, and I wouldn't want to get in over my head.
Edited by Otto Tellick, : Added a sentence as noted, at risk of disrupting the flow of the discussion.
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.