Self Comes to Mind

with important decisions in our personal and civic lives. 8 To let the unconscious sway of past emotion guide your choice of a house is fine, provided you stop and reflect carefully on what the unconscious is offering you as an option before you sign the contract. You may conclude that the choice is not valid based on the reanalysis of the data, regardless of how you intuitively judged the situation, because, for example, your past experiences in this domain are atypical, biased, or insufficient. This is all the more important if you are voting in an election or on a jury. One of the major problems faced by voters in political elections and in courtroom trials is the strength of emotional/nonconscious factors. The power of nonconscious, emotional factors is so well recognized that a perfectly monstrous machinery of electoral influence has developed as an industry over the past few decades, along with less publicized but equally sophisticated methods of influential jury selection.
    Reflection and reassessment, fact checks, and reconsideration are of the essence. Here is a great occasion to invest in extra decision time, preferably before entering the voting booth or handing your vote to the jury foreman.
    All these findings exemplify situations in which nonconscious influences, emotional or not, and nonconscious reasoning steps have a bearing on the outcome of a task. But the subjects are very much conscious when they are given the premises of the task, as well as when the decision occurs, and they are informed of the outcomes of their actions. It is clear that these are examples of nonconscious components of otherwise conscious decisions. They let us glean the complexity and variety of mechanisms behind the facade of allegedly perfect conscious control, but they do not deny our deliberative powers and do not free us from responsibility for our actions.
A Note on the Genomic Unconscious
     
    A brief note is in order regarding the genomic unconscious, one of the hidden forces that conscious deliberation needs to contend with. What do I mean by genomic unconscious? Quite simply, the colossal number of instructions that are contained in our genome and that guide the construction of the organism with the distinctive features of our phenotype, in both body proper and brain, and that further assist with the operation of the organism. The basic design of our brain circuitries is instructed by the genome, and that basic design contains the very first repertoire of nonconscious know-how with which our organisms can be governed. The know-how has to do first and foremost with life regulation, issues of life and death, and reproduction; but precisely because of the centrality of those issues, the design promotes a number of behaviors that may appear to be decided by conscious cognition but are in fact driven by nonconscious dispositions. The spontaneous preferences one manifests early in life, regarding food and drink and mates and habitats, are driven in part from the genomic unconscious, although they can be modulated and modified by individual experience throughout development.
    Psychology has long recognized the existence of unconscious foundations of behavior and studied them under the rubrics of instinct, automatic behaviors, drives, and motivations. What has changed recently is the realization that the early placement of such dispositions in the human brain is under considerable genetic influence and that, notwithstanding all the shaping and remodeling we undertake as conscious individuals, the thematic scope of such dispositions is wide and their pervasiveness astonishing. This is especially notable regarding some of the dispositions on which cultural structures have been built. The genetic unconscious had something to say about the early shaping of the arts, from music and painting to poetry. It had something to do with the early structuring of the social space, including its conventions and rules. It had something to do, as both Freud and Jung certainly sensed, with many aspects of human sexuality. It had a lot to contribute to the fundamental narratives of religion and to the time-honored plots of plays and novels, which revolve in no small part around the force of genomically inspired emotional programs. Blindly set jealousy, impervious to common sense, hard evidence, and reason, drives Othello to kill the perfectly innocent Desdemona, and Karenin to punish the adulterous Anna Karenina so harshly. Iago’s monumental