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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Even without this device there's been some consideration to the thought that the conscious brain is merely an observer since it appears to activate after the unconscious brain takes actions. You just go along with what the unconscious mind did in actions and speech and you convince yourself you meant to do that after the fact.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3746176/

So here it could indeed just fire off speech and you know what? We'd probably convince ourselves that we absolutely meant to do that. In fact it could be a very interesting experiment (with willing participants). Mess with the inputs the device receives so it's not really the person activating it, let it do it's thing and see if they notice when they do/don't have control of it.

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I find this simultaneously fascinating and disturbing; once you have someone using this, they become a hitherto-impossible human-AI hybrid, where their mind is now a fusion between the two, completely unnoticed to the user.

Funny, I was just pondering this last night - how I often realize this phenomenon immediately after it occurs, and feel helpless when I realize it. It's like two minds, one that is moving my hands to pile mangoes into my face, as the other is telling me to save some mangoes for later (they're very hard to stop eating). But on a more serious note, now that I realize I realize it, I realize it a lot.

I once got too enthusiastic about eating mangoes and my face learned that the skin contains urushiol like poison ivy.

Even though the conscious brain doesn't always directly control motor skills, I wouldn't call it "merely an observer". It's your consciousness that decides your goals and beliefs; the rest of the body "learns" those things and is then preconditioned to react accordingly.

But they are separate systems. Harsh experiences (traumas) can teach your body some bad lessons in such a way that not even your conscious mind can overcome. In these situations, you can't "think your way out" of these traumatic consequences in, say, a talk therapy session; you need to deal with the body directly/somatically to recover instead.

> It's your consciousness that decides your goals and beliefs; the rest of the body "learns" those things and is then preconditioned to react accordingly.

Quotation needed.

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