Subconscious Ideas

CF divides ideas, as a useful approximation, into conscious (explicit) ideas you can state in words and subconscious (inexplicit, intuitive) ideas — including emotions, hunches, and gut feelings. The key CF claim, framed in Popper’s terms, is that subconscious ideas are genuine units of knowledge doing real thinking, not mere noise: they are below consciousness but not unconscious like a rock.

The central asymmetry is computational. CF takes the brain to be literally a computer and holds that well over 99% of its processing power is subconscious; conscious attention is a scarce bottleneck resource. This inverts the common rationalist picture that treats explicit reasoning as the rational part and emotion or intuition as the irrational part to be overridden. For CF the subconscious is a necessary ally of reason — great thinkers win by recruiting subconscious computing power, not by straining the conscious mind.

Learning therefore means delegation. You figure something out consciously, refine it for a low error rate, then practice until automatization hands it to the subconscious, freeing conscious attention to build the next layer of the knowledge skyscraper. The same mechanism cuts both ways: biases and errors also live subconsciously, where they are harder to find and fix, especially core ideas formed before age five.

Because the subconscious handles complexity poorly but executes simple steps fast and reliably, training it requires simplifying skills into explicit patterns, steps, and triggers — you cannot delegate what your conscious mind has not yet made precise. Contrast this with treating intuitions as opaque feelings to be trusted or suppressed wholesale.