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pjeby comments on Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up? - Less Wrong
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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... :)