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Yvain 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).
Patri Friedman once wrote something about "wanting" versus "wanting to want". I agree that everything you do, you genuinely want to do, in the sense that you're not doing it under duress. But not everything you do is something you want to want to do.
Likewise, if I imagine myself suddenly getting infinite willpower, there are certain things I would do more and other things I would do less.
I'm using the word "conscious" to refer to things I want to want and things I would do more with infinite willpower. I'm using the word "unconscious" to refer to things I don't want to want and things I would do less with infinite willpower. I don't think it's too controversial that those are two different categories.
But they're not natural categories. The problem is that "consciousness" tends to focus on behaviors rather than the goals of those behaviors... as will be obvious to you if you've ever been a programmer trying to get people to give you actual requirements instead of just feature specifications. ;-)
So, it can be quite factually the case that you want not to do certain things, while also wanting (implicitly) some part of the result of those actions.
The problem is that protesting you don't want the action is not helpful. Our preferences are most visible in the breach, because consciousness is effectively an error handler. So your attention is drawn to the errors caused by the behavior, rather than to the goal of the behavior. Your brain wants you to just fix the error, and leave the working part of the system (from its point of view) alone.
But in order to fix the errors intelligently, you need to understand a bigger part of the system than just the location where the error is occurring. Specifically, you need to understand the requirements that are actually being met by the behavior, so that you can find other ways to implement those requirements.
What's more, I can guarantee you that when you find out those requirements, they will ultimately be something that you either do want, or did want at some time in the past, even if on reflection they are no longer relevant. Calling them a product of the unconscious mind is a factual error, as well as misleading: it implies they came out of nowhere and there's nothing you can do about them, when in actual fact they are (part of) your true preferences, and you can choose to pay attention and find out what they are, as well as searching for better ways to get them met.
I really think this is a bad way to think about it. Please see my comment elsewhere on this page.
EDIT: Unless of course you just define "genuinely wanting to do something" as anything one does while not under duress. But in that case, what counts as duress?