Some casual thoughts on (sub)consciousness

maybe a sprinkle of free will is all you need

Hello! If you’re hungry for science writing, I now have a few articles you can check out in Quanta Magazine:

This one is a historical account of a theorem about symmetry that is central to theoretical physics, which was discovered by a woman (a win for DEI! lol jk. rip.)

This one came out most recently, and is perhaps my first piece of true science journalism. I covered some recent physics research exploring the possibility of a new kind of quantum particle.

While I’m starting to branch out into (hopefully) publishing more and more science writing in actual publications, I’ll be using this Substack to be more personal and unedited. In that spirit, today’s newsletter is based on a little thought I had recently.

Here’s what inspired the thought: I was eating dinner while watching a Youtube video on my phone (classy). Beneath the video is the top comment, which you can click on to open the full comments section.

I was mostly listening to the video, since my attention had to be split to make sure I wasn’t dropping food on myself, so I didn’t consciously read whatever this top comment was for a while. It turned out that it was just a direct quote from the video, because as soon as the sentence began to be spoken, my eyes darted down to the comment, reading the quote as I was hearing it.

Could it have been a coincidence? Sure. But I had some sense of recognition that a subconscious, peripheral process in my brain had actually read the comment, or perhaps the first word or so, before I consciously paid any attention to it. Then, hearing the quote in the video made that peripheral information pertinent, and my attention was directed there.

Again, can I be sure that this is what happened? No. But it felt like what happened. However much weight you want to attribute to that is up to you. Either way, this brief synchronicity inspired me to spend some time thinking about the subconsciousness, as a reminder that there is much more going on in our minds than just our conscious thoughts.

To clarify, when I refer to the subconscious, I mean all processes in our brain that are not conscious. This includes the Freudian-like vault of inaccessible memories, but it also includes everything else our brain does in the dark—motor control, breathing, processing light and sounds, bubbling up emotions.

If our subconscious brain processes are able to control much of our attention and movements, then the realm of things we do consciously is really quite limited. There’s a big difference between an autonomous being (one that reacts and responds to its environment) and a being with free will (which moves in response to an internal desire and plan to move), and it seems like we are somewhere in the middle.

Of course, it would be an exhausting existence if we had to consciously control all of our motor movements, so it isn’t too surprising that we don’t. But it’s a reminder that if we only identify with our thoughts, and reject or ignore our more bodily messages and intuitions, we are missing out on a lot of ourselves. (On the other hand, if you always act by the whims of your impulses, then you are really not very free either.)

It also brings me back to a central question when it comes to consciousness: What is the purpose served by free will and our “lights on” experience of consciousness? Why doesn’t our subconscious brain cover everything we need to do to survive? I believe that free will does a few things the subconscious can’t, these being evolutionary advantages that brought us the brains we have now:

• It allows us to engage in logical reasoning disconnected from any external physical reality.

• We can abstractly wonder about hypothetical outcomes to things we have no experience with.

• We can make decisions to act based on these forms of abstract thinking. This can supersede our impulses to act based on past experiences and intuition.

• We can communicate these abstract thoughts to each other. This enables us to glean inner knowledge from someone else’s logic or someone else’s story, and impact each other’s behavior.

It feels pretty cool that, as humans, we get to live in this middle ground between the visceral and the abstract. That in itself feels like the distinctly human way to be.

In an experiment in self-expression, here is the entry from my journal, when I was first responding to my little Youtube comment experience: