Not all of human reasoning is conscious. Though this may seem initially contradictory, the existence of intuition is proof of this idea. The subconscious has innate and learned patterns which enable it to make judgements utilized by the conscious such that the conscious cannot instantly justify its reasoning for such judgements. For the innate, consider facial expressions—we are intimately aware of an individual’s emotional state by his countenance, but unless we are learned, we cannot justify exactly why we make such a judgement. For the learned, consider cultural morality; we instantly compute that a particular behavior is unacceptable and react via vociferation or consternation, even though such a taboo may not exist in another culture. We may even go on to recant a reaction after conscious deliberation.

The conscious and subconscious can also work together in reasoning, in the sense that the subconscious contains patterns which the conscious can appeal to without explanation, such as

How can you say he’s nice when he yells all the time?

as opposed to

Historically, people who are characterized by anger are rarely kind. This man yells at people at a significantly higher rate than most. Yelling very often connotes anger. According to these facts it is likely that this man is not particularly kind. This directly contradicts your claim that he is nice, for which kind is a synonym.

This is generally helpful. The more that deliberation uses the conscious reasoning instead of the subconscious, the more such a deliberation becomes analogous to a formal proof—a prolixity which is undoubtedly exhausting.

This is unhelpful, however, when the subconscious reasoning directly contradicts logic (e.g., that if we have received 9 Tails, we should expect a Heads to follow) or is the source of an ensconced belief which cannot be justified (e.g., we assert that art is objectively good merely because it pleases us).

As a result, we must find the appropriate distribution to each type of reasoning. As seen in Interests and Incontrovertibility a great deal of conscious reasoning is necessary for proper cogence, though subconscious reasoning is also necessary to avoid verbosity. We must also pay close attention to our judgements; if they have any significant weight, we must use our metacognition to identify the subconscious reasoning which putatively justifies these judgements, and consciously determine whether they are logical. These motions are necessary for the interest of logical consistency.

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Autonomic Reasoning

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