Consciousness, Subconsciousness, and Instinct

A thought was once planted into my head, and it was so long ago that I can’t remember where it came from, but it has remained there, and I’ve ran the implications of it around and around ever since.

The thought is an offshoot of a scenario in which a person can simply tell that there is someone standing behind them, despite not being able to see or hear them, with a certainty lacking in scientific fact and akin to instinct.

Basically, the idea is that although the person cannot be seen or heard, tiny, infinitesimally small changes in air temperature caused by the warm body, and equally tiny changes in air pressure, air circulation, background noise being blocked out etc. all contributed small amounts of data that indicated a person was indeed standing behind, despite not having been seen or heard.

These small amounts of data were so infinitesimally tiny that they didn’t register on the conscious brain, i.e. you are not consciously aware of all the pockets of air around you, their density, temperature, circulation, how sound travels through them etc. However, you ARE aware of them on some, subconscious level. And that’s the key to the argument – subconsciousness. [What do you mean that’s not a word? I’m adding it to dictionary, I don’t care that it’s not a word yet].

If the brain is divided into the conscious mind, which deals with decision making, and the subconscious mind, which deals with making your heart beat, your fingernails grow etc, then I believe there is an overlapping part that we call ‘instinct’. When you have no conscious data to apply to a scenario, but you find yourself ‘just knowing’ the answer, odds are that (unless you’re simply taking a stab in the dark) your subconscious mind knows more than your conscious mind, i.e. in the scenario earlier described, although you weren’t consciously aware of the person standing behind you, the tiny fragments of data picked up by your subconscious contributed to figuring that out, and this idea was forwarded to you with a feeling, rather than a knowing, that someone was behind you, i.e. you instinctively (or rather, subconsciously) knew that someone was behind you, without consciously knowing it.

What implications and applications does this idea of ‘instinct’ have? Well, you may have at some point been involved in a scenario where you did something, i.e. made a CONSCIOUS decision to do something, and that event turned sour, and you found yourself saying ‘I knew that was going to happen’. Really? How did you know? Was it instinct? And is instinct merely the collective word we use to describe the function of the subconscious mind, i.e. the tiny fragments of data that go seemingly unnoticed by the conscious mind? Is instinct actually just as valid as tangible, conscious thought?

Furthermore, this idea has applications for just about all human decision making that, at first glance, appear to be based on something less than logical. Spontaneous decisions, for example, often appear to have little due thought process. But do they really? Or, when we make a spontaneous decision, are we simply acting on the tiny fragments of data stored in the vast chasm of our subconscious? Is a spontaneous decision actually much more thought out than we first realise, the only difference being that the thought process took place in the subconscious mind rather than the conscious one?

This is basically what I’m getting at: If there’s a scientific and methodical approach to conscious decision making, and we call this consciousness, then does the scientific and methodical approach taken by our subconscious brains constitute subconsciousness? Does it even exist, or am I making this up?