101. Tackling Unconscious Ideas
Let's classify any entity in the mind as an idea. Everything that can affect one's thought processes, whether you are aware or unaware, is an idea. Desires, feelings, opinions, beliefs, and intuitions are all examples of what we now call ideas. They have a theory component and do not exist as purely objective information. Having a theory component means ideas make guesses about reality.
Ideas drive behavior. Depending on the context/environment, the net result of these guesses is physical action. Every action is the output of mental processing and ideas affect our thought processes. The sources of those ideas could be genetic predispositions, culturally transmitted memes, or other sources. When those sources transmit the information to the mind it takes the form of ideas like software on a computer.
After all, the mind is a universal computer capable of performing any computation. The focus is on the type of computational process, not memory and processing power. By this I mean the mind has the capacity for universal combinatorial and representational powers (language, mathematics, symbolic logic) and, therefore can encode any other algorithmic process. This insight is important because it implies that we can change ideas like we can change software.
We all have acted in irrational ways. We have bad habits. We are impulsive at the wrong times and fail to do the right thing at other times. Cringe-worthy decisions are only revealed in hindsight. As we have shown earlier behaviors are idea-driven, and if ideas can be changed then so can behaviors, but the ideas could be unconscious. This poses a problem. How can we address them? If those ideas are unconscious then there seem to be only two ways to overthrow the ideas in question:
Conjecture about what the idea/s entails. Refine your conjecture by correcting the errors in it. The aim is to have an explicit conjecture that represents the unconscious idea/s. Criticize the refined conjecture and hence the idea/s itself.
and/or
Find a more powerful idea or set of ideas to displace the idea/s directly or indirectly.