Rand Quote About the Subconscious
Discussion started by Dennis Hackethal
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.
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 the subconscious is 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.
[…] 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.
[…] 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?
[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?
[…] your subconscious is programmed by chance […]
This sounds as if chance was the programmer. The word ‘randomly’ might have been better. But that presumably still isn’t quite what she meant; I think she meant something like ‘haphazardly’, with no clear direction, by uncritical integration, ie osmosis, of ideas from the surrounding culture, as I believe she put it elsewhere.