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Comment by CTDOCodebases | Hacker News Reader

It's wild how people don't acknowledge the subconscious mind or care to examine or experiment with how the conscious and subconscious mind interact. Even subconscious is a bad word for it. Outer conscious would be better.

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I'd call the conscious the "outer" and the subconscious the "inner". It's hidden inside the black box. See also the structure of the brain (neocortex is on the outside, built on top of the other layers).

Why would you call the conscious the outer though if the conscious does not directly experience what we refer to as the external world? i.e it appears to be filtered through the subconscious.

My mental model is that the ego is a shield that separates the space of thought into subconscious and conscious parts, and it moves its boundaries to draw shadows (in the Jungian sense) around parts of the subconscious for the purpose of self-coherence and self-preservation.

Would it be fair to say that according to your mental model it casts a shadow on those parts but reflects light other parts?

As a side note I'm both amused and curious why my original comment currently has negative votes. I would think that there would be many people here that share that sentiment though I guess some people find it scary to question the nature of reality.

It might be because psychological science has long since given up on these concepts as unscientific.

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