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PhilGoetz comments on Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up? - Less Wrong
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Look more closely. All preferences are equal, in the sense of being within the same system -- and this includes signaling preferences. The drunk prefers to drink and prefers to not be thought of as preferring that. But these are not concepts of a different nature; they can both be expressed within the same behavioral preference system.
IOW, both the Cynical and Naive theories are wrong; we only have one set of preferences, it just sometimes works out that the "best" compromise (in the sense of being an approach that your brain can discover through trial and error) is to say one thing and do another. But both the saying and doing are behaviors of the same type; "conscious" vs. "unconscious" is a red herring here.
Now, if you want to say that you don't consciously identify with some subset of your choices or preferences, that's fine, but it's not useful to claim that this is the result of some schism in your being. It's all you, you just aren't being conscious of that part of "you" at the moment.
The "unconscious mind" isn't a real entity; it's not a "mind", in the anthropomorphic sense. It's just whatever you're not paying attention to right now, that keeps on going. If you pay attention to your breathing or your heart rate you can learn to control them. If you pay attention to your feet you'll know where they are right now. And if you pay attention to what you actually get from your "akrasic" behavior, you'll realize it's something you genuinely want.
What you haven't been doing, is negotiating fairly among all your "interests" (to use Ainslie's jargon), or cleanly prioritizing your "controlled variables" (to use Powers's).
You're agreeing with Yvain, not disagreeing with him. He is saying that the cynical and naive theories are different ways of looking at the same thing; and so are you. The only difference is that he isn't suggesting we jettison the ideas of "conscious" and "unconscious", and you are.
Generally, if you decide to declare that a principle embraced by several generations of scientists is rot, you should provide some evidence.
Generally, if you decide to pick a point of debate like that, you should try doing some reading first. May I suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind for starters? In particular, the sections on "Controversy" and the notes that mention the current parlance for other-than-conscious mental processes is usually "non-conscious" rather than "unconscious"... precisely because cognitive scientists have found the now-cultural notion of an "unconscious mind" to be misleading about the nature of our non-conscious processes.
And rationalists in particular should be wary of the phrase, because it basically amounts to a stop-sign for actually thinking or investigating anything. I'm reminded of an exchange between a student and Richard Bandler, where the student (a psychiatrist, I believe) asked if something that the demonstration subject was doing was "turning it over to an unconscious process", and Bandler replied with something to the effect of, "That's not actually an explanation, you know. Everything is unconscious until you pay attention to it."
But there are some things on which the attention can easily be focused at will (like the name of your second grade teacher, when you're not thinking about them) and other things upon which the attention can never be focused, or only with great training (like the regulation of body temperature).
And there are some things which it seems like you can change at will (like whether or not you go out to dinner tonight) and other things which it seems you cannot change without great difficulty (like whether you freeze up and "choke" when speaking to large groups of people)?
Aren't priming, response to the IAT, self-handicapping and a slew of other mental phenomena done on a level that cannot be accessed no matter how hard you try to access it?
So what's wrong with going ahead and calling all these things you're not conscious of and cannot choose to focus attention on "unconscious"?
Why don't you ask the scientists who've chosen to start using "other than conscious" and "non-conscious"? I imagine their insights would be useful. ;-)
My personal reason, though, is that the term "unconscious" implies a unity and coherence to these phenomena that does not exist, and is easily over-extended to a fallacy of grey -- an excuse not to dig, a "stop sign" for thinking about your preferences andpaying attention to your mental processes.
And I particularly dislike the notion of an unconscious "mind" because it primes all sorts of misleading anthropomorphic projections of intention, purpose, and independent behavior, as well as unknowableness (after all, how can you ever really know what's in a "mind" other than your own?).
So, if I understand this part of the thread correctly, pjeby is arguing that Yvain made a poor word choice that confused a straw man.
I personally prefer the term "subconscious" for these situations. It gives the impression that a subconscious process is one that is right there, swimming beneath the surface - leaving it able to be accessed by the conscious mind with a greater or lesser degree of ease... while still being a word that people recognise and perhaps don't have as many incorrect cached thoughts for.
non-conscious sounds like something you are when you've been knocked unconscious... :)