> It totally works but whose work actually is it? I feel like I'm taking credit for someone else's graft.
Probably true in this age given how much interaction with other develops we have
My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
61–70 of 119 posts
Re: My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
#62This makes a lot of sense when you consider more just how small a role your "conscious" mind plays in your cognition. It is really more of a control center, and has direct access to a very limited amount of your computing power. You can't consciously monitor all of your sensory neurons, or make use of the math processing your mind can do to throw a ball, or manually coordinate your muscles. You can see the effect of…
You also don't know what your next thought is going to be. Furthermore there are strong arguments that free will is an illusion. See "Free Will" by Sam Harris.
The illusion of free will isn't, though :) Still trying to figure out what that means.
Re: My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
#63This makes a lot of sense when you consider more just how small a role your "conscious" mind plays in your cognition. It is really more of a control center, and has direct access to a very limited amount of your computing power. You can't consciously monitor all of your sensory neurons, or make use of the math processing your mind can do to throw a ball, or manually coordinate your muscles. You can see the effect of…
You also don't know what your next thought is going to be. Furthermore there are strong arguments that free will is an illusion. See "Free Will" by Sam Harris.
The concept "argument" presupposes you have freewill so its circle, self-contradictory non-sense to "argue" that it is an illusion.
Edit: for clarity
Re: My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
#64I'm not a professional developer but I also found that the solutions I find, the elegant ones, always come this way. My only conclusion is that this process is not algorithmic. Somehow, something top-down takes over the normal, trained, bottom-up.
I refuse to name this thing as god or magic or whatever. It has no name yet and I don't need one.
Re: My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
#65This makes a lot of sense when you consider more just how small a role your "conscious" mind plays in your cognition. It is really more of a control center, and has direct access to a very limited amount of your computing power. You can't consciously monitor all of your sensory neurons, or make use of the math processing your mind can do to throw a ball, or manually coordinate your muscles. You can see the effect of…
I agree. Also, some people groping with this idea will use the word "unconscious" when referring to the subconscious but the distinction is important. The subconscious is always doing something, processing info, etc., even when we sleep, i.e. it is an active process. We aren't necessarily conscious of it hence the prefix "sub" or below consciousness. Unconscious implies inactivity, inertness like a boxer knocked out in the ring.
>It is not generally helpful to think of this as a different person,
I think this is down right harmful and one of the psychological manifestations of the mind/body dichotomy. Disowning your subconscious is a path to neurotic behavior and unhappiness. It is "you" just automatized from your past and one of the most important tasks of the conscious mind is to monitor and correct automatized past errors through introspection.
Re: My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
#66I used this a lot while consulting (as System Architect). I usually instantly knew if something was a good or bad idea of going about things (or a technology to use), but would then often have to go off and do some intense research to provide the evidence of my totally gut-based opinion. Often I found such evidence sooner rather than later, but sometimes I did not. Since it still felt right, I'd present whatever I did find in order to try and persuade clients to go in that direction, and often it was sufficient to persuade them - especially ones I'd been working with for a while and gained some trust.
I can't think of a time where this instinct has been wrong (except when it instantly thought that Twitter was a terrible idea - and I'm still awaiting the final verdict on that one), although the real reasons why it was the right choice for a situation did not always become apparent until much later. I learnt to listen to this instinct, but wish I could gain better insight into its decision making process! :)
Re: My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
#67If you look carefully enough its not only the developer in you but anything meaningful or living in your life is done by someone other than what you usually refer to as me. Normally, such phenomenon is mostly associated with ideas we get on waking up or during shower or exercise. My observation is that whenever you do anything that's unscripted or unplanned - it's "someone else". Say - answering well an interview wit…
> "I'm from India and I find it hard to communicate with western people these ideas directly."
I'm from a Western country, and understand what you're saying, though I admit I did pick up on the general idea from Eastern philosophy.
If you were interested in sharing the ideas with Western people, perhaps you could do so in the form of thought experiment? For example (and this is only an example, I'm confident this won't be the best example for everyone), you could point out how much of human life exists at the subconscious level. Nobody knows how the mind works, yet the mind works regardless. Nobody consciously tells their bodies how to process food, or repair itself after it's damaged, yet it happens anyway. Considering the myriad of processes that the subconscious undertakes, wouldn't it be fair to say a large part of what makes us 'us' exists at the subconscious level?
That's not to say the 'narrative' side of our mind is not part of us too, but if that's all we know perhaps we're missing the bigger picture.
Re: My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
#68This is going to be difficult to accept probably, but fwiw here's the gist of what modern psychiatry has to say: the brain is not divided into conscious thought and unconscious thought; rather, all the brain's work takes place unconsciously, on all topics, all the time. What we then call consciousness is a product of the fully occupied and engaged unconscious mind.
So in terms of the headline, your unconscious is not a better developer than you are; your unconscious is your only developer.
Furthermore, [while emotion and logic both exist] there are not logical thoughts and emotional thoughts, emotion is engaged in thought all the time. You will actually form different "logical" conclusions on the basis of your mood, emotional state, etc. (As an example in grossly stereotypical terms, this is what you might imagine happening "so clearly" in a PMSing woman; the fallacy is that men are not doing the same thing all the time, they are.) So, to the blog poster's point, his unconscious "better developer" is actually the emotional preoccupations of his consciousness getting in the way of his being able to get to realize what his uncounscious developer is capable of. [Didn't mean to overstate that: in the case where he notices his unconscious mind coming up with good work, sometimes it just takes more time to create/uncover a good solution; just saying it's the same portions of the brain continuing to chew on the problem, conscious or not.]
For people interested, the brain science book "Thinking Fast and Slow" is very good, it will convince you that your brain does not work the way you think it does. It doesn't necessarily say all what I said above, some of that comes from psychiatry. Freud's enduring contribution to the field was his realization how much unconscious thought was taking place. BTW the term "unconscious" is preferred because historically in the field, "subconscious" is a term associated with Jung's "collective unconscious".
Re: My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
#69I used this a lot while consulting (as System Architect). I usually instantly knew if something was a good or bad idea of going about things (or a technology to use), but would then often have to go off and do some intense research to provide the evidence of my totally gut-based opinion. Often I found such evidence sooner rather than later, but sometimes I did not. Since it still felt right, I'd present whatever I di…
This is your limbic system calling. The hypothalamus and amygdala together produce judgements based on experience. The dopaminergic signal they send is what we call a gut feeling. They excel at managing/judging large amounts of information, especially in the absence of tools.
You might also call them the seat of learning. Dopamine is very sensitive to errors in prediction, which is how learning is mediated. What they are not is the seat of reason.
This is also (partly) why we are bad at distinguishing things we desire from positive judgements: they use the same signalling. That is when your neocortex is useful. Being able to override the limbic system is one of the defining characteristics of conscious behaviour. Feeling driven to do so is another dopamine-mediated reward structure: the satisfaction of solving a puzzle.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbic_system
p.s. my limbic system agrees with yours re.Twitter.
Re: My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
You also don't know what your next thought is going to be. Furthermore there are strong arguments that free will is an illusion. See "Free Will" by Sam Harris.
The concept "argument" presupposes you have freewill so its circle, self-contradictory non-sense to "argue" that it is an illusion. Edit: for clarity
I'm not sure I understand what you mean.