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Congratulations! You've just discovered the stuff that un-scientific mystic psychoanalyst Carl Jung has observed long ago. =) He explicitly said in one of his books that "When two people are talking, there are really four sides participating in conversation" (That is, 2 people, and 2 unsonscious minds.) Imagine being a cop handcuffed with a criminal, when you go to some "cop bar" to talk to your buddy, who has another criminal cuffed to him. As you sip your coffee and eat your donuts, the criminals use secret criminal language to communicate. So why can't it be that way with our u-minds? Also, it can get better: if we suppose that unconscious mind can be AT LEAST as strong as conscious one, why can't we suspect that the totality of our unconscious minds do really form vast "network" that communicates by virtue of "seemingly telepathy" (because we can't even detect what our u-minds speak about?). And about this presupposition about "unconscious mind being as strong" - it's not as absurd as it may seem. For one, there are people with multiple personality disorder: they have literal "other minds" inside of them they are not aware of. For two, there are instances of people having their hemispheres divided who started acting as "two disagreeing people" sometimes. So, mind has shown itself at least some times capable of containing "more than one person" - just like you can have a new Windows and old Windows on a machine (maybe even a little Linux thrown in for extra fun). Besides, our brain is a black-box machine that is far yet from having been cracked - can we really be sure that it does not contain "extra persons" just in any human? Take your dreams, for example - you can meet persons there and have a semi-coherent or even coherent conversations with them. These people are "product of your brain" - but so (from a physical standpoint) are "you". Besides, it's not like these people cannot, for example, feel things or think about things, or lie and deceive you for fun and/or profit, or whatever. (I remember a dream when I realized that it's a dream and told a friend she was in my dream, and so will she have dissolve once it ends. She was really frightened and geniunely saddened by that, and I then felt guilty. Even now I remember this guilt). So, the point is - if your brain produces "you" in waking life and it produces "you + other people" in your dream, why can't it covertly produce "other people" in waking life, too? Who can know the real power of u-mind, especially since conscious mind is a recently fresh development, and u-mind had to "steer the wheel" all the millenia before it? ...aaaaaand this is the objection Carl Jung seem to have had to pure rationality, and which I seem to share. Our "rationality" is just a part of what constitutes us, a relatively recent part, and possibly not the most IMPORTANT part (inasmuch it is a servant but not master). Those who claim that their rationality is, indeed, a master, seem to be tragically misguided, at least as long as they wear the same meatbag body as we all do. Although it pumps up the feeling of superiority. The best rationality we can have (if it is worth as a final goal at all) is impersonal rationality, rationality of science, which is independant of our selves and our intuitions. By fanatically making more and more precise theories that predict more and more accurately we may acquire the corpus of knowledge that is objective in some sense. The trouble is, of course, that this corpus is one thing, and we, mere humans, are another thing. We, for one, grok this knowledge in the form of language we are comfortable with - the language evolved from millenia of survival-struggle. It's ironic that we discuss finer points of quantum physics, or general relativity, or evolutionary biology, in the language that descended from animal howls. But it's not only ironic, but troubling and alarming: what if we, at some point, will have to devise a theory that our animal-derived thought processes will be unable to grok at all? We may still have this "scientific objective rationality", but we as humans will be no more suited to practically use it as elephants are to playing piano. We already have trouble understanding quantum mechanics, and no, "shut up and calculate" isn't a real answer, because people are easily worse calculators than, well, calculators, not to mention that calculation is not a way to predict some non-trivial experiments that could be done and that could show non-trivial properties of all that quantumy stuff.

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RobinHanson's avatar

I did try to edit this, but it didn't take; not sure why.

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