Subconscious Computing Power
also Subconscious processing capacity
The brain's large reservoir of subconscious computation, holding the overwhelming majority of one's thinking power and dwarfing what conscious attention can do.
CF treats the brain literally as a computer, and holds that the subconscious controls the great majority of its computing power — Elliot Temple estimates well over 99%. The conscious mind is like a single manager overseeing a factory of thousands of subconscious workers: it can inspect where it chooses, but it can never supervise everything at once. Thinking is computation, and most computation happens out of conscious view, just as most of what a computer does never reaches the screen.
The point is an asymmetry. Conscious attention is the scarce conscious bottleneck — people sustain only a few hours of heavy focused thought per day — while subconscious capacity is abundant. So trying to be a great thinker through conscious analysis alone fails: it draws on roughly 1% of one’s power. The leverage comes from teaching skills to the subconscious through practice and automatization, freeing conscious attention for new learning.
CF rejects the common view that rationality means favoring the conscious mind and distrusting emotions and intuitions. On CF’s Critical Rationalist footing, subconscious ideas — emotions, intuitions, hunches — are genuine units of knowledge doing real thinking, not the irrational part of the mind. The practical upshot: spend scarce conscious time on self-improvement, delegate frequently-reused skills to the subconscious, and keep error rates of low-level automatized building blocks far below 1%, since a single high-level act can invoke thousands of subconscious sub-ideas.