I guess I did consider it that completely obvious. If it's causing so much controversy, maybe I need to think about it more.
I'm defining my "conscious self" as the part of my mind that creates my verbal stream of thought and which controls what I believe I would do if I had infinite willpower. I'm defining "unconscious self" as the source of my inability to always go through with my conscious mind's desires.
By definition, my unconscious mind has no qualia / experiences / awareness, because if it did it would be part of my conscious mind (I suppose it's possible that it is a "different person" who has experiences that are not my experiences, but I have never heard anyone propose this before and don't know of any evidence for it.)
When I use the word "I", I refer to the locus of my qualia and experiences, and thus to my conscious mind. I have no selfish reason to care about my unconscious mind, because its state as happy or unhappy has no relationship to my state as happy or unhappy except insofar as the unconscious mind can influence the conscious mind. And I have no moral reason to care about my unconscious mind, because in my moral system only aware beings deserve moral consideration; the unconscious mind has no more awareness than a rock and deserves no more moral consideration than a rock does.
Along with my qualia, I identify with my rationality. My rationality is what tells me that there's very probably no such thing as ghosts. This satisfies my conscious mind, which then accepts that there's no such thing as ghosts. It does not satisfy my unconscious mind, which continues to make me flee haunted mansions or sleep with the lights on or something. My rationality is what tells me that I should ask that girl out because the worst she could do is say no. My conscious mind accepts that. My unconscious mind continues to use all of its resources to hold me back from asking.
It seems vanishingly unlikely that my unconscious actually has as supergoals "Flee haunted mansions" and "Never ask girls out" and is rationally achieving them. It seems much more likely that the unconscious is enacting genetic directives like "Avoid danger" and "Avoid taking risks that could lower your social status", but is too irrational to realize that although equivalents of these situations might have been problems in the EEA, they are no longer problems today. It thinks that "Flee haunted mansions" and "Never ask girls out" are appropriate subgoals of the supergoals "Avoid danger" and "Avoid taking risks that could lower your social status", but in fact they aren't. Since it's too dumb to realize this, I feel suitably superior to it to ignore its opinions.
The same is true of morality. My unconscious is what tells me to value the life of a photogenic American more than the life of a starving Ethiopian, to value the life of one specific person more than the life of fifty statistical people, to refuse to push the fat man onto the tracks in the trolley problem no matter how many lives it would save, et cetera. If another person had this morality, I wouldn't respect it in them, and if my own unconscious has this morality, I don't respect it in it either.
Let me also admit that I have a bias here. I've got obsessive-compulsive disorder. It means that my unconscious mind frequently tells me things like "Close that door there eighty two times, or I will throw a fit and not let you feel comfortable for the rest of the day." I know that feeling is caused by miswired circuits in the basal ganglia. Why should I give miswired circuits in the basal ganglia the same respect as I give myself, a full intelligent human being?
All of my other unconscious urges seem closer to that urge to close the door eighty-two times than they do to anything rational or worth respecting.
Since it's too dumb to realize this, I feel suitably superior to it to ignore its opinions.
Which is why you then experience akrasia. Or, if I was going to anthropomorphize(?), I'd say, "which is why it feels entitled to ignore your opinions right back". ;-)
See, "your" opinions don't count for all that much in what you actually do. If you want to change your behavior, it's your "unconscious" opinions that you need to change. But you won't change them without first being aware of them, and if you keep the attitude you hav...
Related to: Cynicism in Ev Psych and Econ
In Finding the Source, a commenter says:
I think I've seen Robin put forth
something like this argument[EDIT: Something related, but very different], and TGGP points out that Brian Caplan explicitly believes pretty much the same thing1:I'll call this the Cynic's Theory of Akrasia, as opposed to the Naive Theory. I used to think it was plausible. Now that I think about it a little more, I find it meaningless. Here's what changed my mind.
What part of the mind, exactly, prefers a socially unacceptable activity (like drinking whiskey or browsing Reddit) to an acceptable activity (like having a wife and kids, or studying)? The conscious mind? As Bill said in his comment, it doesn't seem like it works this way. I've had akrasia myself, and I never consciously think "Wow, I really like browsing Reddit...but I'll trick everyone else into thinking I'd rather be studying so I get more respect. Ha ha! The fools will never see it coming!"
No, my conscious mind fully believes that I would rather be studying2. And this even gets reflected in my actions. I've tried anti-procrastination techniques, both successfully and unsuccessfully, without ever telling them to another living soul. People trying to diet don't take out the cupcakes as soon as no one else is looking (or, if they do, they feel guilty about it).
This is as it should be. It is a classic finding in evolutionary psychology: the person who wants to fool others begins by fooling themselves. Some people even call the conscious mind the "public relations officer" of the brain, and argue that its entire point is to sit around and get fooled by everything we want to signal. As Bill said, "believing the signals, even if untrue, makes the signals more effective."
Now we have enough information to see why the Cynic's Theory is equivalent to the Naive Theory.
The Naive Theory says that you really want to stop drinking, but some force from your unconscious mind is hijacking your actions. The Cynic's Theory says that you really want to keep drinking, but your conscious mind is hijacking your thoughts and making you think otherwise.
In both cases, the conscious mind determines the signal and the unconscious mind determines the action. The only difference is which preference we define as "real" and worthy of sympathy. In the Naive Theory, we sympathize with the conscious mind, and the problem is the unconscious mind keeps committing contradictory actions. In the Cynic's Theory, we symapthize with the unconscious mind, and the problem is the conscious mind keeps sending out contradictory signals. The Naive say: find some way to make the unconscious mind stop hijacking actions! The Cynic says: find some way to make the conscious mind stop sending false signals!
So why prefer one theory over the other? Well, I'm not surprised that it's mostly economists who support the Cynic's Theory. Economists are understandably interested in revealed preferences3, because revealed preferences are revealed by economic transactions and are the ones that determine the economy. It's perfectly reasonable for an economist to care only about those and dimiss any other kind of preference as a red herring that has to be removed before economic calculations can be done. Someone like a philosopher, who is more interested in thought and the mind, might be more susceptible to the identify-with-conscious-thought Naive Theory.
But notice how the theory you choose also has serious political implications4. Consider how each of the two ways of looking at the problem would treat this example:
I myself throw my support squarely behind the Naive Theory. Conscious minds are potentially rational5, informed by morality, and qualia-laden. Unconscious minds aren't, so who cares what they think?
Footnotes:
1: Caplan says that the lack of interest in Stickk offers support for the Cynic's Theory, but I don't see why it should, unless we believe the mental balance of power should be different when deciding whether to use Stickk than when deciding whether to do anything else.
Caplan also suggests in another article that he has never experienced procrastination as akrasia. Although I find this surprising, I don't find it absolutely impossible to believe. His mind may either be exceptionally well-integrated, or it may send signals differently. It seems within the range of normal human mental variation.
2: Of course, I could be lying here, to signal to you that I have socially acceptable beliefs. I suppose I can only make my point if you often have the same experience, or if you've caught someone else fighting akrasia when they didn't know you were there.
3: Even the term "revealed preferences" imports this value system, as if the act of buying something is a revelation that drives away the mist of the false consciously believed preferences.
4: For a real-world example of a politically-charged conflict surrounding the question of whether we should judge on conscious or unconscious beliefs, see Robin's post Redistribution Isn't About Sympathy and my reply.
5: Differences between the conscious and unconscious mind should usually correspond to differences between the goals of a person and the "goals" of the genome, or else between subgoals important today and subgoals important in the EEA.