We clearly possess an autopilot and an actual pilot function.
Actual piloting (critical thinking, reasoning, creativity) requires more mental effort and is much slower. Perhaps our brains are optimized to have the pilot train the autopilot (so to speak) when necessary, but otherwise leave things to the autopilot? I suppose that's why training, muscle memory, and practice are so important.
I don't think any of this is controversial but it does seem a lot more human activity runs on autopilot than we thought.
I'd like to contest the use of the term "actual" pilot for the the more deliberate pilot.
For some reason, we as humans seem to like thinking of our conscious / deliberate pilot as ourselves, and the subconscious / autopilot as some form of "Other" somehow cohabiting our bodies.
(I'd expect this viewpoint to be especially true for the academic / programmer crowd here on Hacker News, who stereotypically tend to be more skilled in logical / deliberate forms of thought, and comparatively lacking in the intuitive / automatic, such as social skills).
However, the subconscious is as much YOU as the part of which you are more aware, and, in fact, probably has a GREATER effect on your action. In conclusion, the autopilot is as deserving of the term "actual" pilot, as the deliberate pilot is.
You can’t just say it’s “as much YOU” as an argument against the autopilot analogy. A plane’s autopilot is still part of the plane as well and will also likely have a greater effect on the action (of flying the plane) than the actual pilot.
derangedHorse has a good reply to this (not that these are new arguments, eg "can the foot say because I am not the eye I am not part of the body?")
I was not referring to the subconscious as autopilot. To stretch this already tenuous analogy further the subconscious would be the flight control software.
I'm saying during our waking supposedly conscious experience our conscious selves (pilot) is actually rarely in control. Most of our choices are automatic (autopilot) and the conscious mind retroactively invents rational explanations for them when we bother to notice them at all.
Free will (if it exists) is probably almost entirely contained within the ability of the pilot to repeatedly tweak the autopilot settings, which is entirely indirect and a far smaller degree of control than we like to suppose.
If you consider evolution this isn't so surprising. Intelligence is just one strategy for adaptation and evolution repurposes and builds on top of existing structures. Why wouldn't the rational conscious mind evolve as a tweak on top of an unconscious intelligence, which itself is a tweak on top of subconscious/instinctual behavior? If animal studies are proving anything it's that intelligence is a spectrum and many supposedly human behaviors (concept of self, tool use, et al) are present in other species.
One rabbit hole to go into with this thought is Hubert Dreyfus and his use of Heidegger's philosophy to explain why the early AI research program was deeply misguided by focusing on explicit cognitive symbolic representation and logical manipulation rather than embodied motivated learning.
From what I understand, Heidegger's phenomenology is related to this piloting and autopiloting, exemplified by the way a hammer only appears as explicit conscious representation to a woodworker when something is wrong with it. The hammer's normal relation to the woodworker is just its ordinary function; the tool's own presence recedes.
But then I also wonder if there's something suspicious about the pilot/autopilot dualism. It seems to mirror dualisms like culture/nature and animal/human. Maybe what we think of as piloting is not as critical, rational, and creative as we are inclined to believe?
> The hammer's normal relation to the woodworker is just its ordinary function; the tool's own presence recedes.
We see the same thing with auto racing. Really experienced drivers "feel" as if the car is an extension of themselves. Its mechanical nature disappears beneath conscious thought.
My hypothesis (admittedly based on little evidence) is this is an optimization function due to conscious thought being a relatively slow process. Once the autopilot has integrated the necessary functions the conscious mind can get out of the way and focus on more "important" things. This appears to apply to memory as well: unless the situation is in some way extraordinary the brain doesn't bother keeping full details in long-term storage. When interrogated later our minds just make up the likely details and call it good enough.
> But then I also wonder if there's something suspicious about the pilot/autopilot dualism. It seems to mirror dualisms like culture/nature and animal/human. Maybe what we think of as piloting is not as critical, rational, and creative as we are inclined to believe?
If it helps I was thinking of the mind as four layers: unintelligent instinctual/automatic systems, subconscious processing, autopilot, and pilot (conscious rational mind).
That said I think you are correct: being critical, rational, or creative is probably rarer than we like to believe. Maybe it is partially a cultural belief, as if admitting we are just cruising through life most of the time makes us seem stupid or un-human?
I'd like to call attention to describing piloting as feeling slower.
It sounds like you have said something objective. But really perception of time is a completely subjective phenomenon as well, constructed from unconscious processes which create conscious experience.
People in great fear report time slows down, but also top tier athletes.
Thinking hard about something is one particular kind of unified subjective experience.
While you are correct that perception of time is subjective, I'm not referencing that phenomenon at all.
I'm talking about measuring reaction time or brain imaging studies.
For top athletes autopilot kicks in and reacts to the situation, then issues commands to our subconscious body control processes, which then issues nerve impulses to begin movement, all before the pilot (prefrontal cortex?) has even perceived the situation, let alone made any decisions. The autopilot knows how to do this via repeated trailing guided by the pilot function.
You can also observe this in brain imaging studies which can show the body reacting before any thought took place. If pressed people will invent a rational justification for their behavior but the brain images prove this is entirely post-hoc most of the time.
My theory is this is due to conscious thought being so much slower, but I don't have any proof.
> Perhaps our brains are optimized to have the pilot train the autopilot (so to speak) when necessary
In a process commonly known as dreaming? I don't think that it is a coincidence that new tasks car we are currently learning to perform (that are still "piloted") often appear in the occasional snapshots of that somehow cross the boundary to our daytime consciousness.
Actual piloting (critical thinking, reasoning, creativity) requires more mental effort and is much slower. Perhaps our brains are optimized to have the pilot train the autopilot (so to speak) when necessary, but otherwise leave things to the autopilot? I suppose that's why training, muscle memory, and practice are so important.
I don't think any of this is controversial but it does seem a lot more human activity runs on autopilot than we thought.