I think there's a lot of sound and fury and misunderstandings and stuff in this area. People try too hard to prove that they've shed Freud without realizing it's basically the same as Kahneman. Also different people are referring to different things when they discuss "consciousness" and "conscious processing" which confuses things.
There's some interesting papers emerging in recent years suggesting that two-system models ("subconcious," "fast," "intuitive" versus "slow," "conscious," "deliberate") have a lot of theoretical problems and can generally be explained by other models that don't have this structure.
At the same time, there's a lot of evidence that there's different types of processing, or processing of different kinds of content, and that people are not always good at verbalizing their state. The analogy I always like to use is visual versus verbal processing: some visual content you can reason about, but have a hard time putting into words, or vice versa. If you were looking for someone at a huge wedding I was at, and I wanted to know if they were there, it's a lot more efficient to show you pictures of that person than to ask you to verbally describe them. This is different types of processing.
I suspect there's something analogous for other types of processing, such as emotional, interoceptive processing, etc.
This is different in a lot of ways from some of what the article is referring to, about subconcious problem solving, but then again the article deliberately conflates the two when talking about, e.g., psychotherapy. The flash of insight of a mathematician and a psychotherapy client are not the same flashes necessarily (although they might be). Maybe neither requires "subconcious" processing. But it is possible they involve nonverbal processing, and also possible that verbal processing is differentially associated with other types of processing.
It's also a mistake to assume that verbal reports of people should be treated as "inner world reporters." What I mean is that there's a difference between asking someone if they are currently hateful, and expecting an accurate response, and asking them for their views on, say, some member of different sociocultural group, to which they respond with hateful speech. Both are self-sourced verbal behaviors, but we interpret them differently.
This is kind of a long-winded way of pointing out there's different things being referred to as "subconcious" (I haven't even gotten into dreams and sleep-arousal states). Saying that one thing can be explained differently doesn't necessarily mean the other thing should be explained the same way. "Consciousness" and "conscious" have become so broadly used that they're close to meaningless because they can mean so many different things.
I wonder if it might be helpful to focus on the _interfaces_ between what look to have been different processing systems that evolved consecutively over time.
For example, when we meditate and do Tolle's experiment where we "wait for a thought", are we actually "packet sniffing" the interface between the Neocortex and the Limbic system?
These interfaces may be somewhat inefficient and ad-hoc from the perspective of humans used to "designing" their own machines. Perhaps this is why the Neocortex seems to "invent" thoughts to explain the emotions being signaled by the Limbic System (because the interface doesn't include sufficient fields to "tag" the emotion output with a reason).
I think there's a lot of sound and fury and misunderstandings and stuff in this area. People try too hard to prove that they've shed Freud without realizing it's basically the same as Kahneman. Also different people are referring to different things when they discuss "consciousness" and "conscious processing" which confuses things.
There's some interesting papers emerging in recent years suggesting that two-system models ("subconcious," "fast," "intuitive" versus "slow," "conscious," "deliberate") have a lot of theoretical problems and can generally be explained by other models that don't have this structure.
At the same time, there's a lot of evidence that there's different types of processing, or processing of different kinds of content, and that people are not always good at verbalizing their state. The analogy I always like to use is visual versus verbal processing: some visual content you can reason about, but have a hard time putting into words, or vice versa. If you were looking for someone at a huge wedding I was at, and I wanted to know if they were there, it's a lot more efficient to show you pictures of that person than to ask you to verbally describe them. This is different types of processing.
I suspect there's something analogous for other types of processing, such as emotional, interoceptive processing, etc.
This is different in a lot of ways from some of what the article is referring to, about subconcious problem solving, but then again the article deliberately conflates the two when talking about, e.g., psychotherapy. The flash of insight of a mathematician and a psychotherapy client are not the same flashes necessarily (although they might be). Maybe neither requires "subconcious" processing. But it is possible they involve nonverbal processing, and also possible that verbal processing is differentially associated with other types of processing.
It's also a mistake to assume that verbal reports of people should be treated as "inner world reporters." What I mean is that there's a difference between asking someone if they are currently hateful, and expecting an accurate response, and asking them for their views on, say, some member of different sociocultural group, to which they respond with hateful speech. Both are self-sourced verbal behaviors, but we interpret them differently.
This is kind of a long-winded way of pointing out there's different things being referred to as "subconcious" (I haven't even gotten into dreams and sleep-arousal states). Saying that one thing can be explained differently doesn't necessarily mean the other thing should be explained the same way. "Consciousness" and "conscious" have become so broadly used that they're close to meaningless because they can mean so many different things.