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Comment by hasenj | Hacker News Reader

> At the end of the experiment and after they woke up, participants had no memory of the words they heard during their sleep, though they recalled the words heard while they were awake very well. So not only did they process complex information while being completely asleep, but they did it unconsciously

I think that even while awake, the decision making happens first unconsciously, then it gets brought into our consciousness.

You think that you are thinking about it, but actually you're just waiting for your subconscious to arrive at the answer and tell it to you.

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"I think that even while awake, the decision making happens first unconsciously, then it gets brought into our consciousness."

If you aren't familiar with Benjamin Libet [1] and his neuropsychology experiments, I think you will find them absolutely fascinating.

From the article: "This work soon crossed into an investigation into human consciousness; his most famous experiment was meant to demonstrate that the unconscious electrical processes in the brain called Bereitschaftspotential (or readiness potential) discovered by Lüder Deecke and Hans Helmut Kornhuber in 1964 precede conscious decisions to perform volitional, spontaneous acts, implying that unconscious neuronal processes precede and potentially cause volitional acts which are retrospectively felt to be consciously motivated by the subject."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet

"you've already made the choice. Now you have to understand it." -- The Oracle

Edit: If that's true, its freaks me out. Maybe our intelligence is overrated if we make our decisions while unconscious. In other words, if I'm making choices while unconscious, are my knowledge, belief, moral compass, etc involved?

Sure they are. The decision process is so complicated, if you were aware of every step in the algorithm, it'd be slow as hell!

Does the source code you load into a computer have any relation to the runtime behavior?

They might be involved in lying to yourself in order to justify acts you perform that fall outside of your belief-spectrum ;)

Its hard to discuss this topic because the words are used in different ways. We all know what it means to be conscious - aware of our surrounding, alert and responsive. It means the same thing as 'not asleep'.

What's the word for the mental processing we do when awake, but are not personally aware of? Is it also 'unconscious'? Isn't there another word we can use?

>What's the word for the mental processing we do when awake, but are not personally aware of? Is it also 'unconscious'? Isn't there another word we can use?

Subconscious.

Sam Harris has written an interesting book on free will that comes to that same conclusion.

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