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It could just be that our unconscious minds minds are a lot more capable than we care to believe. It’s only when we let go and have faith in the unconscious mind do we see it.

I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity.

If you believe in determinism then we are essentially just spectators of our own life. We just don’t realise it. We think that because we have made choices it was a possibility that other outcomes could have arisen. We don’t acknowledge that everything was always going to converge at this single point i.e everything was always going to be as it is now.

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Another example is reading and language in general. You're parsing this statement dramatically faster than you would if you tried to actually consciously think about each word in this statement. And the really cool thing is that your subconscious pattern recognition is dynamic and robust. You can even fluently comprehend rndm abrvs adn tpyos wthot any efrt.

Speech is similar. By far one of the coolest little experiences you get when learning a foreign language (that's outside your language family) is when speech that is completely incomprehensible, as in you can't even make out words or separations, somehow one day just 'clicks' and becomes a series of mostly unknown but distinct and recognizable phonemes.

Yes I have experienced this:

- In kindergarten we had to pack away the learning materials at the end of the year. I have a distinct memory of just shoving the little papers with words on them into the folder. I thought I was going to get into trouble for not doing it properly. I couldn't read the words and didn't understand which order the words and letters had to be in. The next year when I came back to school I could read.

- After living in Italy for a few months I was sitting in a car with the radio playing. All of a sudden I could understand what they were talking about on the radio without any visual cues. It was a breakdown of an economic report on employment that was performed by the government. The only word I knew before traveling to Italy was "ciao".

Trying to listen in on conversations on the bus/train in Rome was also interesting. Sometimes if the people were talking softly I couldn't tell if they were talking english or italian. My internal voice switched to Italian. Because I learnt italian verbally I had a local accent. I would observe the expression on peoples faces as I started reaching the limits of my abilities to communicate during a conversation. A Look of confusion would slowly take over until they remarked "oh.. your not from here". Even once I left Italy I would express reactive words like "stop!" "look out!" etc in italian not english.

I'd go even further: our conscious minds are a lot less capable than we care to believe. The vast majority of our actions are unconscious. Think of all the unconscious things that we are doing moment to moment, heart beating, breathing, thinking. Have you ever found yourself using the bathroom w/out having consciously decided to do so? How much of the day is stimulus->response w/out any conscious course correction?

Can I take it further? The line between unconscious and conscious is not black and white, it’s a gradient. “We” live way up in the narrative-making world, but there is plenty of conscious activity going on below that. Still tons of reasoning, logic, planning, just no (or less) self-reflection and story telling.

That’s why practicing a sport leads to improvement — those lower-level aspects of our consciousness get to practice and then the analytical mind gives feedback and direction, but when it comes time to really perform it is always better to stop the narrator and let those (still very conscious!) aspects do their thing.

In terms of actions I'd agree that the line between conscious volition and instinctual seems pretty blurry. But in terms of experience it seems like there's a pretty sharp line between conscious experiences and subliminal ones with stimuli just below a threshold acting very differently from stimuli crossing it.

As an example, people with Blindsight lose the ability to consciously access what they see but they don't lose the ability to see. They can still reach out and grab something in front of them but they can't tell you verbally it's there. And if they close their eyes they can't remember where it was and grab it based on that like most people can, information that doesn't reach the level of consciousness fades from the brain almost immediately but information that enters your consciousness can persist over time.

Who really believes in determinism these days? The people who believe that one day, should we have enough inputs we could make provable predictions about the behaviors of sentient beings? That AI will become fully conscious like a human?

I don't claim to be an expert in the area, but it seems that non-determinism in nature seems to rebut that possibility. At the subatomic level, to a systemic level.

Meanwhile the idea of a deterministic universe masked by a fake belief in in our own consciousness is something of a deeply pessimistic thought.

If we everything has been determined, and you are just an observer within this deterministic vessel, then there's absolutely no reason why ethics should have any consideration, among other problems.

I'll just settle on the existential dread that I've been making the wrong decisions...

I have the same experience... writing SQL code. When I'm programming, say in Python, I still see, in my mind, some manipulation of abstract concepts.

When I write SQL, it feels like the code pops in my consciousness magicallyfor me to lay down. This also means that I can very much explain and justify why I wrote Python code the way I wrote it, but I can't do that for SQL, I can just show that it works.

I am experienced in both, and I feel I write both with the same ease, I don't think it's due to me struggling with programming.

Well, metaphysics aside, SQL is declarative whereas Python is imperative. Imperative languages are a "show your work" kind of deal, mechanical. Declarative languages are more of a "trust the machine / trust the abstraction" expression of an abstract idea, so it's no real surprise that the feel of the act of programming is different.

> It could just be that our unconscious minds minds are a lot more capable than we care to believe. It’s only when we let go and have faith in the unconscious mind do we see it. I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity.

When you first learned to type, you did it consciously, again and again until a different part of the brain started to trigger the muscle movements. It's almost like returning to the awareness of the movements, opens up the programming process again and so the system slows.

The idea of sensory gating is very interesting, too. The structures of the brain that limit some of that input from the world - there is so much of it, it's overwhelming. The brain should focus on some of it at a time, within a sort of bandwidth limit, or it gets frazzled. A problem with this mechanism is said to be related to autism disorder. It's also possible to induce a reduction of this sensory gating process with psychedelics.

I think it's more likely the unconscious part of the mind has a lot more agency and is much more active than we give it credit for.

Benjamin Libet found that actions we believe to be volitional, intentional acts arise in the brain 500ms prior to the sensation of "deciding" to do them.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but it may be that Libet's findings have been brought into question.

"people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision."[1]

In short, Libet's findings may have been an experimental error related to noisy brain activity.

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...

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