Rand Quote About the Subconscious
#661·Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoAyn Rand writes:
Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.
[The] main function [of your subconscious] is the integration of your ideas.
Isn’t it the conscious mind that does the integrating, and then the subconscious stores the integrated ideas and executes them in applicable contexts?
#661·Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoAyn Rand writes:
Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.
[…] more complex a computer than men can build […]
It’s not clear to me that the basic building blocks of the subconscious (as opposed to its components at runtime) are necessarily all that complex. Why couldn’t they be simple?
#661·Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoAyn Rand writes:
Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.
[…] more complex a computer than men can build […]
Unclear what exactly “can” means here. More complex than we can build today? True. More complex than we could build in principle? Not true: we could build it, given the right knowledge.
#661·Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoAyn Rand writes:
Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.
Your subconscious is like a computer […]
She says “like” so the sentence is technically correct, but it would have been clearer if she had said it’s a program (or an amalgamation of programs). What she’s presumably getting at here is that the subconscious is automatic like a computer and unlike the conscious, which can stop and reflect and criticize and so on.
Ayn Rand writes:
Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.