Can we escape our pre-conditioning? - Page 2

i wouldn't think that is a very easy thing to do by conscious choice Decius, surely any sort of forgetting or amnesia is an unconsciously induced thing. Repression is usually caused by the unconscious trying to forget a trauma of somekind.

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and in answer to your question, yes, you can actually "loose" your "memmory" by choice. It's called repression.

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However repression is a conscious act of will and therefore not really equitable with loosing something…such as ones memory. Perhaps only physical damage, such as a head injury could actually cause one to ‘loose' the memory.


Anyway I think Decius has answered the original question by stating:

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Therefore, although it may not seem that we have control, we certainly do -

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In that our subconscious mind informs belief which is then in turn able to inform the subconscious mind.

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To re-iterate, it is never the unconscious "trying" to do anything - the unconscious is a neutral entity controlled and programmed by the conscious mind. The sub-conscious only chooses based on what you consciously have chosen.

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Do you therefore make the assumption that the conscious mind is the same as the thinker?

"At the subconscious level, the process and content are out of direct reach of the conscious mind. The subconscious thus thinks and acts independently.

One of Freud's key findings was that much behavior is driven directly from the subconscious mind. This has the alarming consequence that we are largely unable to control our behavior, and in particular that which we would sometimes prefer to avoid.

More recent research has shown that the subconscious mind is probably even more in charge of our actions than even Freud had realized." - http://changingminds.org/explanations/personality/freud_personality.htm


The subconscious is, in my opinion and what seems to be the majority of psychologists, not neutral in the least bit. Plenty exists in the mind without conscious choice. Though repression is a possibility it isn't realistic to say that we all can change the things Chiron is talking about by repression.

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Plenty exists in the mind without conscious choice.

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Or perhaps plenty exists in the mind without our conscious awareness... which kind of goes back to the original question of whether or not we can attain sufficient self-awareness in order to make new choices (based upon revised beliefs) that can in turn 're-program' the sub-conscious mind.

It all starts to sound a bit like a process of self-deception, lol!

But I would like to know whether you think that you are one and the same, or the sum total of both your conscious and sub-conscious minds?

Im not very good at getting my thoughts out in a logical, scientific way so Ive found this post very hard to write.

But this is my interpretation of Chiron's question, the resulting conversation and what I think of it.


I suppose you could see us as computers with certain programming put inside us without our approval.

In your formative stage when you were being built, you didn't really have any control or independent thought. If you had Windows as your background programming you couldn't say no. If someone abused you as a child and that manifested itself as malware or a virus, once again you had no control over your preconditioning.

Then later on in life, particuly around the teenage years when you went through the metamorphosis from child (being told how to think and act, and what programs were installed inside you to make you who you were. ) to an adult (having to think and act on your own.) you then had the ability for introspection and self awareness.

And it's at that stage you are able to ask the questions like Chiron has asked as a means to eradicate any negative pre-programming and reprogram yourself the way you feel you should be programmed.

Like all our computers are different and function differently, they are a result of the programming we as users have subjected them to. Some Im sure work very well. And others run very poorly. All due to what is put into them from the environment they are in.

Looking at the except from Freud and also other things I have read, I see the concept of subconsciousness and consciousness like this.

There is so much information in the world all happening at any one time. And our minds cannot concentrate on all of it at once. We would have a sensory overload and could not function.

So our mind is like a lense. It uses the senses to focus on certain things we tell ourselves to the things we see as important.

Everyone using that lense will, due to what was around them at the time when they first learnt to use it, will eventually form the habit of zooming in on certain things.

This is I believe what happens due to our subconsciousnesses effect on us.

Our subconsciousness is like a harddrive. It stores the memories of our experiences and data of our sensory focusing for us to retrieve when we need it.

And like the mind, the hardrive only has so much capacity. This means our CPU has to decide what to take in and store and what to delete. IE what is important to us as an individual.

So what we have first experienced will determine what is initially stored in our hardrive.

And from that, eventually a way of seeing the word is created. So that even though, contrary to what is actually around us, our mind will automatically zoom in on the things it knows and recognizes.

Say for example. You grew up with an abusive father who always beat your mother. At a young age those impressions would be left in your hardrive and be quite strong.

Then as you grew up, you would be subconsciously trying to analyze that data as you tried to make sense of yourself, your environment and your place in it.

(Whereas another person with loving parents did not have that initial information in their hardrive and so grew up preconditioned with their own set of initial data that would eventually be sorted and analised, and give them their own unique personality and beliefs and fears and preconceptions etc.)

But you grew up this way and your CPU decided to make sense of the information it had to go with. And since you can only focus on so many things at any one time, your mind would slowly teach itself to zoom in on those things that at a young age left such an impression in your mind.

And you would constantly be looking for those things, because that is what you have grown up to believe the world to be like. Even if the world in actual fact wasn't this way at all.

Eventually you would come to the conclusion that men treated women poorly. And your mind would be preconditioned to search that out in anything you came across to keep proving your beliefs right.

Our infant mind's first task is to take in our surroundings. Then analise those surroundings and experiences from the world around them, and come to a conclusion of what that world is. Then it will consider this reality. It needs a sense of reality to stay sane. It needs things to make sense for it to continue to function in the reality it has defined for itself.

This means our minds want to believe a certain way. They need to feel that they are right. As a result they focus more and more on things that reinforce those beliefs.

Anyone who doesn't believe this must ask themselves this one question:

If the world is a certain way. Water is wet. 1 plus 1 equals 2 ECT. Why is that none of us see the world the same?

I believe this is a result of the initial hardwiring, then consequent analising of it, and then years and years of preconception and preconditioning being reinforced to the point of people willing to kill for their reality.

But it is up to us to try and see through all of that early preconditioning. The nights you hid under your bed when your father bashed your mother and you tried to block out the screams and the sound of an angry fist on flesh.

This is the hard part. But like Decius, I believe it can be done.

Just like the computer can be reprogrammed, so can the mind.

It's just that it is almost impossible to do. As our mind is not something physical that we can touch and work on like a machine.

You cannot take out any pieces and look at what's wrong with them and fix them then put them back.

But as Decius has said, you can look at those thoughts and work out what put them there and why. And whether they are of use, or holding you back.

Then you have train yourself to recognize when your mind is having those impulses and negative thoughts. And teach it to not focus on them. Even though they have been ingrained into your mind since you were too young to even know they were being placed there.

That is the hardest thing of all. To catch your subconscious mind telling you all those things that hold you back.

But I will leave that up to Decius to explain in more detail, as I think he has a better grasp on it than I do.

"Absolutely. but not initially. I'm not observing the mind from the point that you're 14. I'm observing it from the day you are conceived and have the capacity to have a sub-conscious." Those weren't my words but another psychologists though I agree. I think I will side with them on when it initially becomes independent.

The sub-conscious is not a neutral entity. It is more of 3 battling "entities": the Id ego and super-ego. The id being our desire for things such as sex food power etc. The super ego being our morals and values, a sort of polar opposite of the selfishly driven id. The ego moderates between the two so that homeostasis is maintained and the human can interact with the rest of its species. Saying that any of these three is neutral is what sounds illogical to me, let alone the whole kit n kaboodle!
I am not opposing the idea of control of the sub-conscious by conscious means but that you are calling it neutral, to me that means it has no agenda of its own which is what I find illogical. And my opposition of it has been to gradually provide more information as we work through each variable of our separate, obviously differing, ideas.