March 28. 2026; most recent update: March 30, 2026

 

Your consciousness is never in doubt. Even if you tried to doubt you were conscious at all, you couldn't take your doubt seriously if you couldn't simultaneously take your awareness of (supposedly) not being conscious seriously. It would be futile.

 

But the subconscious is much harder to grasp and believe is real, especially since it's never present in our consciousness. We can only infer its existence, since we can never know its existence first hand.

 

By definition, consciousness is a state in which something has active representations (i.e. indicators of the world). Percepts, concepts, propositions (thoughts), and symbols are the four basic types of representations. In contrast, subconsciousness is a state in which something has inactive representations.

 

But since subconscious representations are by definition inactive, how can we ever really know that they exist? Consciousness is the only thing we have that is empirically verifiable, whether internally or when observing someone's behavior. So, isn't that the only fundamental state of mind we should claim exists? No, because a lot of our knowledge also depends on inference. Thus, there's no reason to call the subconscious an unscientific concept simply because it can't be observed. And even though we can't observe it, there are powerful arguments that it exists.

 

The subconscious absolutely exists -- it must exist. This can be understood by asking yourself a simple question. At any moment in time, could you be conscious of everything you know? Could you keep all of that knowledge in mind at once, focusing on every bit of it? Of course not. We can speculate on why that's impossible. There are probably many reasons. Perhaps most importantly, how could you ever think about the issue at hand if knowledge on innumerable irrelevant subjects was always there to distract you? But whatever the reasons, that such a scenario is impossible isn't controversial.

 

So, where does all of that knowledge go when we're not using it? It's clear that the mind would need a place to store it. And there you have the necessary existence of the subconscious.

 

We can also see that the subconscious is necessary in urgent situations when we don't have time to consciously think. How would we able to act and do what we need in those circumstances if conscious thought was our only guide? Where would our knowledge of what to do come from? Again, we're forced into inferring that the knowledge could only come from a non-conscious area of the mind. Otherwise, we would have to say that we can never act in situations when conscious thought isn't possible, and we know that's false. Our actions in those scenarios might not always be correct, but that we can act on some kind of immediate inference isn't disputable.

 

In today's age of computers, the idea of a subconscious realm shouldn't seem odd, since computers handle the "knowledge overload" issue in essentially the same way described above. RAM can be thought of as a computer's consciousness, the immediate data it's using from a program. Every computer has limited RAM, therefore there's ROM. So, ROM can be thought of as the subconscious, the pool of data it can access from the program but isn't currently.