• Introduction
• The Three Pillars of Mind
• Ability of Subconsciousness
• The Hypothetical Analogy
• Deciding Better

Introduction

We always have a desire for the things to happen in the manner we want them to be – be it rational or irrational, ethical or non ethical. Ever wondered about the hidden force or energy which helps you make those decisions? We tend to introspect the decisions taken in the past and derive the factors consciously which forced us to take them. What if the decisions were wrong? Is there a way we can avoid making wrong calls? Let us dig a bit deeper which can help us figure out the factors which help us make subconscious decisions.

The Three Pillars of Mind

According to Sigmund Freud – a well known Psychologist, human behaviours are based on three major pillars which can be visualised as in the picture given above. The one which is visible clearly above the sea is called our conscious mind. This part of mind is what we actually have the control over. With its help, we knowingly make decisions whether they are good or bad. We actually know the factors or the attributes while using our consciousness. Our consciousness is the smartest amongst the three. It can categorize things very easily, the feelings – good/bad, strong/weak, colours., etc. It is what we learn from our surroundings.

Then comes the preconscious or the subconscious part of the mind. This part of mind is the most innocent one. It does not know how to differentiate. It is what sits beneath the consciousness and gets triggered within us unknowingly. The most confusing argument in this case can be – Is subconsciousness the same as human memory? The answer is NO. Memories can be brought into our consciousness advertently whenever we want – which is not the case with subconsciousness. Subconsciousness is like an assistant to our conscious mind which becomes the decision maker when our conscious-self is engaged in something else. It does not know whether the act it is forcing us to do is even good or bad.

The third and most dangerous part of the mind is our unconsciousness. It is the most cunning part of us which mostly is inaccessible. But, sometimes they slip out in the form of dreams or in reality unknowingly. We often tend to ignore them considering them as mistakes. Unconsciousness mostly consists of our repressed thoughts or feelings. They mostly trigger the thoughts which are negative in the rational world. For example, consider being attracted sexually towards your sister, which your conscious mind can never allow you to but can come to your mind unconsciously in your dreams which you have no control over. Since it develops an alternate reality which is unacceptable in your consciousness, we generally play safe and tend to ignore it whenever it gets triggered.

Ability of Subconsciousness

Let us consider the case when you are driving a car. Once you learn the driving skills perfectly, you don’t really focus on the basics of the driving. You just hold the steering and talk to your partner and your subconsciously does the driving for you. You just get lost for some minutes and when you gain your consciousness, you realise that for all the moment you drove, it was with absolute safety. This is what a subconscious mind can do for you. It can analyze tons of situations simultaneously and process them all in microseconds which is very difficult for our conscious mind to do.

The Hypothetical Analogy

With all the discussions above, it should be now clear that if you have trained your subconscious mind very well, it can do a hell lot for you in making good decisions. Now, let me bring up an interesting analogy for this. Nowadays, most of us are aware of what artificial intelligence is. Machine learning and deep learning are two subsets of it. So, machine learning is basically a set of algorithms designed to find hidden patterns in the historical data to make predictions for the future dataset. Now, the difference between classical machine learning algorithms and deep learning is that the former has very simplistic architectures while the latter is based on architectures involving too many complexities in it. Similarly, our consciousness works based on the attributes which are intuitive and easily explainable. They are like decision trees which can be explained very clearly based on certain logics. On the other hand our subconsciousness works based on uncountable neural sparks happening in our brain which cannot be explained easily. Now based on these informations, we can now correlate our subconsciousness with deep learning methods and consciousness with usual classical machine learning. Now the question was, how can we train our subconsciousness in a manner that it assists the consciousness in the most productive way?

See, to train a classical machine learning model, you don’t need huge amount of historical dataset. While to train a deep learning model, you need a large amount of data for it to be able to learn those complex hidden patterns. Now, consider those dataset as the different experiences we have in our life, the diverse situations we get involved with, the types of people we get to meet, the types of food we eat., etc. Our consciousness can make its judgement close to accurate with very less amount of data/domain knowledge. But the problem with the consciousness is, it’s very slow and can not process too many situations simultaneously. So, to make faster decisions more accurately, we need our subconsciousness to be really very smart.

Deciding Better

Now, the answer should be pretty clear to you all. To develop a really smart preconsciousness, we need to expose ourselves to the diverse world as much as possible, we need to expand our domain knowledge as much as possible and once you get to that threshold, you won’t really need to stress yourself much for making a good decision. Like I said earlier, your subconscious will do most of the stuff for you without even bringing anything to your conscious knowledge.