Our subconscious minds do the real thinking, and once they reach a conclusion, the conscious part of our mind is notified. At least that’s what I used to assume before reading Nick Chater’s The mind is flat, which proposes a radical and well-argued departure from this model. According to Chater, there’s no subconscious with its own beliefs, goals or values, of which the conscious is the surface. Instead, the subconscious is just running dumb pattern recognition and processing algorithms, and the conscious is all the real thought there is.
The mind is flat came out before the advent of large language models, which is a shame because in some ways LLMs are an example of a flat mind. To be sure, there are weights behind the model, but they don’t indicate depth. Instead, the output of the model is all there is.
Nehaveigur 