An Analogy For The Subconscious

Imagine that you are inside of a dark room, equipped with a flashlight that you can only point in one direction at a time--this means that you can only see one part of the room at a time, as directing the light to another area means taking the light away from the part it was on before.  Nothing in the room is beyond your ability to see.  The only limitation here is that you can only see one part of the room at once.

This will serve as an analogy I will use to show the irrationality of believing in a subconscious part of the human mind (in the Freudian sense) that lurks behind experienced consciousness.  I've shown the stupidity of positing the existence of the subconscious before [1], but this time I will use the room scenario to demonstrate this.  I will explain what the components of the scenario mean.

In this imagined setting of the room, the room is a person's mind, the light is the person's conscious attention, and the dark non-illuminated areas are the parts of the person's mind that are not being actively perceived (the memory storehouse).  In this sense, the dark areas are the "subconscious," because they are outside of the immediate conscious perceptions of the person.  The darkness is outside of the immediate focus of the light, but it does not hide anything beyond the ability of the person to perceive.

What the Freudian concept of the subconscious amounts to is not something like the analogy here.  The idea of the subconscious in this ideology is not the mere admission, to use the analogy I brought up, that there are other parts of the room that the flashlight is not currently focusing on, but the belief that something outside the room, unseen, is controlling activities inside the room.  Even if such a thing was true, there could never be any evidence for or proof of it, since the claim is that a part of the mind exists that is invisible to the conscious subject.

The analogy of the room, person, and flashlight shows just how absurd believing in the subconscious is when the phrase does not refer to a memory storehouse.  When someone says his or her "subconscious" is dictating his or her attitudes or actions, it isn't difficult at all to point out the logical errors in claiming this.  The concept of the Freudian subconscious is a notion that is unscientific, since it cannot be tested by the scientific method.  It is illogical to believe in it, since it cannot be logically proven.  Believing in it is a philosophical blunder.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-subconscious.html