"What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets!"

Today I was set to thought by a comment in a blog. It read: do you believe in the subconscious?

It is the wrong question. A more apt attempt at the core of the problem would be: "Is there evidence for activity in the human body, specifically, the brain, of which the person himself is not aware of?". And, yes, there is. LOTS! It is not a matter of faith, nor is there any ambiguity about the existence of the subconscious. 

It probably dates back to Freud and his theories on the human mind, retaining their attractiveness not only due to the groundbreaking first effort into psychoanalysis, but also due to sex being the focal point of referance. It seems odd to me, that the idea, that there could be "thoughts" in one's head that one is not aware of, would seem so peculiar. But perhaps I becomes clearer, if we hark back to the zeitgeist of ages past.

Since antiquity the dominant train of thought has been what modern thinkers call "phenomenological" i.e. it concerned itself specifically with world as experienced by human psyche, not world as experienced by an evolved homo sapiens body. This backwards analysis of reality lead to the assumption that human beings possess a "self" that is capable of change, yet fundamentally permanent, a Soul. And under the theory of souls being the source of selfhood and supposedly everything that constitutes a person, it was unthinkable that something might come out of the soul that the person himself was not aware of. Thus the stage was set for a dramatically unsympathetic worldview - people were thought to be the sole instigators of their actions. The brave and just were praised, the disturbed and failing were deemed to be lacking in their soul's fundamental qualities (faith for a considerable time, lately it's positivity).

Modern thought has come a long way to change all this. Where physics has laboured to rip man out of the centre of the universe, demonstrated he does not sit on an even remotely significant planet, which revolves an unimpressive star in a backwards galaxy made mostly of an insignificant type of matter in, possibly, one of countless non-unique universes, cognitive science (for far too long there have been "sciences") has made its business to illuminate the fact that humans don't have a singular self, are mostly oblivious to their inner goings-on, suffer countless afflictions of thought and are ultimately without free will. This might sound ironic, even cynical, but these discoveries are among the most hopeful in recent times. Where singular self is abolished, a true understanding of the flexibility of the human mind can be achieved. Where we recognize that we do not understand ourselves, we can begin to learn to observe what we are thinking. Where the human condition is understood not as a function of souls and demons, but as interaction between genetic and environmental factors, well-being can grow. Where there is no free will, compassion and love become the ultimate path.

With a bit of understanding the question about the subconscious becomes straightforward. The default state of consciousness in practically all life on Earth seems to be an absence of it. It is just in humans that the ability to monitor certain brain activity has evolved. And consciousness is just that - the evolved ability to have a thought "I'm having this thought." There is little basis to assume that this monitoring extends to all brain activity, quite the contrary, most brain activity never enters our scope of comprehension. It might even be surprising to find that the capacity to observe oneself's mind varies greatly between individuals. And the jury is still out on to what extent, if at all, this ability to monitor certain brain activity influences said activity, i.e. what is will.

I happen to think that humans are complex biological machines, devoid of ability to operate outside the software they have been installed, most of the time oblivious to this fact and clueless as to what their operating system is, with direct hotline to support services only a dreadful scam.

So, what is man? A miserable little pile of secrets, especially to himself.