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Like Sophie, I am interested in the roles played by conscious and unconscious thought. So far all the questions and doubts we are discussing - can we have certainty about things outside of our minds, is there anything that is TRUE, and also more generally, that "science" is a process of people trying to achieve some degree of "objectivity," through commonalities in their own subjective experiences - these are all questions of the conscious mind. But what of the unconscious?

What struck me when Prof Grobstein kept asking us if facts about the world were to true (and we were supposed to continuously respond no) was that I kept wanting to say "they are true to whomever thinks them". Sure, consciously I can doubt that there is actually a computer in front of me right now, or that I am actually a body, but my unconscious self that is telling me to act even before I am conscious of it DOES BELIEVE THOSE THINGS TO BE TRUE, it must! Why else would it be acting at all? In fact, to my unconscious mind, THOSE THINGS ARE TRUE. If we are going to give anything a capital T Truth value, I would say it is the inputs our unconscious mind is acting on.  We can question all we want consciously, but until we can make our conscious thoughts affect our unconscious beliefs (“beliefs” being yet undefined – maybe they are neural pathways, maybe they are something less concrete in the “mind”) we are not actually affecting change in ourselves. When I taught myself in seminar on Monday to make the flashing dots on the warning sign move in all directions, I truly felt like “reality” had totally slipped out from under me, and felt as though if I tried hard enough I might be able to control absolutely everything around me. However, until I meet Morpheus and learn to make a spoon bend in front of me with my mind, reality does exist for ME. Reality is the facts about the world I cannot or have not yet convinced my unconscious mind to believe are false. Or could be false, if I wanted them to be. Training myself to see the flashing lights move in different ways made me absolutely convinced the conscious “mind” can and must affect the unconscious “brain”.

What science is then is more than just finding commonalities between our conscious interpretations of the world, but also finding commonalities between our unconscious notions of reality. I guess I am a believer that it doesn’t matter if there’s anything “really out there”, because to our unconscious minds, there always will be.