How the unconscious goes about its work is not so much poorly understood as not understood at all. It is an area pretty much ignored by the artificial intelligence studies, which seem mostly devoted to analytics and to the question of whether the brain is like a computer. They have decided that it’s not
Is that true? Who has decided the brain is not like a computer? That is news to me.
His article is interesting in parts but really arrogant and not as novel or anti-mainstream as he seems to think it is. It sounds like someone who spent a long time chatting with physicists or biologists and no time reading research in artificial intelligence, at least from the last decade.
However there are a lot of flat statements like this made in the article where I’m not entirely sure what the author meant or what grounds he had for saying it and this is one of them. Another is:
"The invention of language was understood at once to be incredibly useful. Again, it seems to have spread through the species almost instantaneously."
How can anyone possibly know that, especially if we have no real idea when it happened?
Edit:
Another thing that got my back up a bit were the disdainful references to 'influential persons', as though David Krakauer and Cormac McCarthy are renegade outsiders.
There are some really good points here that I largely agree with. Most of what we do or know or think or even say is processed or generated by the unconcious mind. I know what I am going to write here and now, but I don't know it in linguistic form until I actually write it. I'm generating it in a non-English language representation in my brain and converting that written into English and only part of that pipeline is really conscious.