I’m enjoying reading Why I Left Orthodox Medicine: Healing for the 21st Century by Derrick Lonsdale. I noticed that he uses the word “subconscious” differently than I do. I wanted to clarify my terminology in case anyone is confused.
I enjoyed reading this. The conceptual model brought up here was very useful to me in grasping things a little better:
The exact scientific details of how brains work are not fully known, but I think we can create reasonable and useful conceptual models anyway. When dealing with many topics including philosophy and rationality, a useful model is to split the brain into the mind (the intelligent part) and the rest, and then to split the mind into the part you’re consciously aware of and the rest. That model has three parts: the lower brain, the subconscious mind and the conscious mind. Because the lower brain is external to the mind, it often doesn’t come up in epistemology, which deals with ideas. Ideas are a data structure within the mind used by our intelligence software.