GOAL: Post free form thoughts, tangents, and restatments of ideas related to the article. I think they’re related to ideas ET has talked about elsewhere.
Thinking about practicing to train subconscious mind: What else is going on besides trial-and-error detection/correction?
Practicing is repeatedly doing something to test whether your subconscious is serving up the right commands. Then you make many small adjustments based on what the subconscious is giving you.
Practicing is still conjectures and refutations. Practice puts the conjectures through repeated trials that refute parts of the conjecture; or they refute variations of the conjecture. Practice makes the conjectures go through a more objective trial than thought experiments. Practice involves doing something in the external world (beyond your mind). Practice brings the objectivity of empirical testing to the skills being tested.
Another reason, besides objectivity, to empirically test the subconscious is that the subconscious is a bit of a black box. It reminds of the oracle from Fabric of Reality, except that the subconscious is fallible and can be changed by conscious thought. Accessing the ideas subconscious comes from trying to find the right questions ask of it by asking a variety of questions and then seeing what answers it gives. One of the ways to do that question answer process is by practicing.
Actually doing worksheets, using flashcards, writing notes, and doing other activities is more effective than thinking alone. Even saying ideas out loud to yourself often helps compared to just quietly sitting still.
Practice takes mental load off the conscious mind during the training as well by adding memory aides to the process. Memory aides allow more of the conscious mind to focus on the specific area being practiced compared to keeping track of all the supporting information at once.
Some questions (just musings/not very well-thought over):
During childhood you taught your subconscious to practice and learn things. You automated parts of learning so that they no longer require conscious attention. Doing that is very powerful.
How context dependent are these automated subconscious learning processes? I guess that they all must be to some extent. Overall skill in English would be a really general subconscious learning skill that lots of other stuff builds upon. Is there some super generalized knowledge structure type automatization that is making a big difference in learning abilities?
Does the quote refer more to something like knowing how to practice effectively? Does it mean stuff like recognizing when you’re not making progress toward a goal in practice? Another one might be, knowing how/when to switch modes of practice to make more progress.
An analogy is using a computer. You can think of the stuff displayed on screen as the conscious ideas. What the computer does, which isn’t displayed, corresponds to subconscious ideas.
Is it possible to expand the scope of the conscious mind? Can the conscious mind learn to display more on the computer screen? Could that be a way of becoming a better learner? What limits if any are there on the size of the conscious mind? Why would the conscious mind have limits?
Quick summary of article:
There are two categories of ideas: conscious and subconscious. The subconscious does the background computation that displays to consciousness.
The categories differ in terms of control and understanding. There is more control and understanding in conscious mind.
Subconscious is usually built with practice. Practice improves the subconscious and frees up the conscious mind. Practice for a low error rate, then automatize.
Subconscious skills are the building blocks for new knowledge. You can’t build very far on faulty layers of knowledge.
Simplify practice into small parts because the subconscious can’t deal with complexity. Make the task procedures very explicit (like and algorithm or recipe).
A lot of subconsciousness was formed when young. Improving on tradition with new or unconventional ideas means using conscious rationality to check for and correct errors.
Teaching your subconscious generally involves practicing. It can also involve visualizing doing things or other sorts of mental practice. It can also involve just thinking about the issue and trying to consciously understand it. But most people, for most issues, find it [sic] to get their subconscious to learn very well just from thinking about something. Actually doing worksheets, using flashcards, writing notes, and doing other activities is more effective than thinking alone. Even saying ideas out loud to yourself often helps compared to just quietly sitting still.
I’ve found this paragraph confusing, and I think it’s the concept of ‘practising’ it presents.
To me, the modifier ‘also’ in the second and third sentences make it sound like ‘visualizing doing things’, ‘other sorts of mental practice’ and ‘thinking about the issue and trying to consciously understand it’ aren’t included in the concept ‘practising’, but are separate. Like, they can be done in addition to practising, but aren’t normally considered practising. But I think all of these things fall under the concept of practising?
Is the point more so to differentiate between mental/internal, and explicit/external practise activities?
Edit: for context, my main goal with this post is to practise writing and sharing comments, thoughts, or problems I encounter when reading/watching/listening to philosophy content.
That’s what I take to be the main distinction.
It seems like there aren’t hard boundaries or categories around a lot of this stuff in terms of how your define practice or internal vs external. An activity can be practice in one goal-context combo and exploration in another goal-context combo. Also, I guess that often multiple things are going on simultaneously. You can be practicing and testing your knowledge for errors and reflecting on sources of errors and visualizing stuff and considering alternative methods all in the same activity. I think the idea with the distinction is that its good to focus on a particular goal with a learning activity and then try different goals with other learning activities on the same topic. It’s good to understand things from a bunch of different angles and in different context so that your understanding is more robust, contains less blind spots, and fewer errors. I think this has to do with having knowledge that isn’t fragile and super context dependent, where you only know how to apply something when asked in a specific way. You want to make connections between things and decide where an idea does or doesn’t apply because you considered it and found that it does or doesn’t work in that context.
Saying “other sorts of mental practice” means it is a type of practice. But it’s a different type than what people often think of as “practice”.
I’d be surprised if you don’t have some normal intuitions about the word “practice”, so you might not be using some of your intuitions when trying to do analysis.
I was re-reading my post and i think about the writing/grammar errors in this sentence. I should have written “different contexts” instead of the singular “context”. I also should have written “has fewer errors” to maintain parallel sentence structure. These are both examples of how I can lose my grasp of the overall meaning of a sentence as I’m writing it. I can think of a couple solutions to this problem. One, write simpler sentences. Two, practice writing low and medium level complexity sentences while focusing on getting specific forms correct (e.g. parallel phrases or compound nouns).
This makes sense. I think I was imagining a much broader concept of practising. I think I came up with the idea that the way that the subconscious learns is always via practise, and so anything that helps your subconscious learn falls under practise. But my basic intuition about what practise is is: repetition of a task, using simple exercises, for the purpose of learning.