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Your questions imply that the conscious is the dominant faculty and the unconscious is trying to communicate with it, which is backwards. The unconscious is driving and the conscious is a PR agent sitting in the passenger seat, making up a story about where the car is headed.

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and

Why does it imply dominance? Agree about conscious mind being more like a PR agent than the dominant force many think of it as. But seems to me that regardless of which part is dominant or subordinate they still need to communicate

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It depends what we mean by the terms we’re using. I think the premise—that the unconscious is trying to communicate with the conscious—is problematic. There’s no true separation, and the image of sending messages back and forth is, to me, a misconception, an illusion.

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Ah, interesting. How do you conceive of the mind then? The image this brings to mind for me is of a bunch of people in a room who may or may not be talking, and if they are talking may or may not be speaking to "you." In other words, if it's an illusion what's the reality?

Arran Rogerson

@arranrogerson

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@dingledoorf

I don’t know! The autobiographical “I” we perceive is a narrative being woven and conserved in order to maintain a coherent trajectory of action that accomplishes the body’s goals. “I”, “reality”, “now” is a story. Movies play with this faculty; mindfulness deconstructs it, etc

12:41 AM · Aug 26, 2020Twitter for iPhone

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“What is reality” is just a really, really tough question and I feel like despite studying the mind for thousands of years we still barely understand it.

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Made even tougher by the fact that whatever reality actually is, it's (probably) very different from what each of our individual perceptions of reality is!

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Indeed. The complexity of countless unique realities interpenetrating is wonderous and overwhelming to consider.