I didn't say it was a simple lookup table. It's indexed in lots of non-trivial ways; see e.g. my post here about "Spock's Dirty Little Secret". I just said that fundamentally, it's a lookup table.

I also didn't say it's not capable of complex behavior. A state machine is "just a lookup table", and that in no way diminishes its potential complexity of behavior.

When I say the subconscious doesn't "think", I specifically mean that if you point your built-in "mind projection" at your subconscious, you will misunderstand it, in the same way that people end up believing in gods and ghosts: projecting intention where none exists.

This is a major misunderstanding -- if not THE major misunderstanding -- of the other-than-conscious mind. It's not really a mind, it's a "Chinese room".

That doesn't mean we don't have complex behavior or can't do things like self-sabotage. The mistake is in projecting personhood onto our self-sabotaging behaviors, rather than seeing the state machine that drives them: condition A triggers appetite B leading to action C. There's no "agency" there, no "mind". So if you use an agency model (including Ainslie's "interests" to some extent), you'll take incorrect approaches to change.

But if you realize it's a state machine, stored in a lookup table, then you can change it directly. And for that matter, you can use it more effectively as well. I've been far more creative and better at strategy since I learned to engage my creative imagination in a mechanical way, rather than waiting for the muse to strike.

Meanwhile, it'd also be a mistake to think of it as a single lookup table; it includes many things that seem to me like specialized lookup tables. However, they are accessible through the same basic "API" of the senses, so I don't worry about drawing too fine of a distinction between the tables, except insofar as how they appear relate to specific techniques.

I agree that the subconscious isn't just a giant lookup table, and that many people who make this error use it to justify practices which destroy other people's minds. But there are some important techniques of making the subconscious work better that are hard to invent unless you imagine that the subconscious is mostly a giant lookup table. pjeby uses these techniques in his practice. Do you deny pjeby's data that these techniques work? Do you even know which data made pjeby want to write "it's just a giant lookup table"? If you do know which data made pjeby want to write that, do you mean that it was wrong for him to write "the subconscious is just a giant lookup table" and not "the subconscious is mostly like just a giant lookup table"?

I feel like you don't think through the real details of what other people are thinking and how those details would have to actually interact with the high standards you have for the thoughts of those people. All you do is tell them that you think something they did means they broke a rule.

Annoyance has a point here. A look-up table is a very limiting model for a subconscious.

What is the benefit you gain by assuming that there is no organizing structure, whether or not it is known to you, within your subconscious?

Personally, I prefer a continually evolving model, updating with experience and observations. With periodic sanity checks of varying scales of severity. Not unlike how I model people.

Of course this lends a resulting bias that I treat my subconscious a bit like a person, with encouragement, care, and deals. This can also lend positive outcomes like running subconscious mental operations for long term problem solving (a more active and volitional version of waiting for inspiration to strike) and encouraging those operations to have appropriate tracebacks to make it easier for me to consciously verify them.

Not sure if that would work for other folks though, cognitive infrastructure may vary.