Sirhinojo:
Apologies for making a long long post but thanks loads for this! This is really helpful because the examples include false associations, and discourse analysis has enabled me to see the big rule on unconscious processing is "no abstraction".
I think what I need to explain more in the next few tutorials (and hopefully here) is this limitation of the unconscious. It's a basic program and it can't make sense of any abstract concepts that don't relate to concrete physical reality.
A good way to imagine unconscious reasoning is to pretend you're trying to share concepts with an alien, using only email text (I'm trying this approach in tutorials too). "Explain to the alien" is a good mnemonic for remembering how the unconscious works and learning how to communicate in terms it understands. And it's a good game, you see how few core-concept-related bits of data you can use to enablt the alien to fully understand the concept : ) If it is a congruent concept, it should need no more than 6.
If I were such an alien reading your examples, I'd start with 'chair', okay, it's a material object, it must be either circular or mobile/mechanical because it is found 'around' tables (other material objects) in a 'sitting room' (is this a room that sits, or a room for sitting down in? Probably the latter) and also at the location of other material objects.
'often sat in' tells me what you earthers do with it often. And this has enough points of similarity already for me to think "Aha! It is like our sitting-mats!"
I would get confused when you introduce the false concept 'chain which holds you at your desk', because this is not true, and it would confuse my concept of chair.
I would be further reassured by 'built, designed, engineered' because we do exactly this with our sitting mats. 'Recuperate energy' would also make sense to me, as we too sit or lie down when we are fatigued.
'often used in decision making' is a bit ambiguous -so is astrology, but if you'd said, 'often sat on while making decisions' that would work. We aliens know about the importance of being calm and relaxed to think clearly.
...In this selection you gave 9 bits of information. 6 of them helped consolidate the concept, and it took only 3 bits of information (material object/often sat in/built, designed, manufactured) for me to understand from your first example a general idea of what a chair IS. You have successfully given the alien a basic concept for 'chair'. I might wonder why you strange earth beings sit on these objects instead of mats, but I'd get the general idea because I also have concepts for variation and cultural diversity.
Not so for the second example. To the unconscious (and the alien), a piece of paper is, well, a piece of paper. We know paper. Paper is great! You can wrap yourself in it to keep warm, write on it, read off it, wrap things in it, stick it on walls, or clean your noses with it. If the paper has something written on it that's important not to forget, or inspiring artwork, we'll tend to weight it accordingly and read its contents out to each other a lot, but while the unconscious can grasp the basics of poetry, stories and songs, it can make no sense whatsoever of abstract concepts like societal law.
To our alien, your ongoing description sounds suspiciously like woo-woo -this mere piece of paper somehow magically accomplishes amazing supernatural feats of defense and protection!
To the unconscious, in real life, we have no 'rights'*. 'Rights' are a fiction made up by people who would really like them to exist, but they don't. Hurricanes and volcanoes and bacterial diseases will blithely ignore them, as will all things real. Predators (and lunatics) will still attack us, fire will still burn us, water will still drown us, unless we are able to replace this 'rights' theory with real physical equipment/behavior such as flood warnings, antibiotics or weapons.
In real life 'rights' are replaced by abilities -if you have the ability to catch your dinner and keep hold of it, you have the ability to eat. If you have the ability to breathe, you still have no automatic right to do so if there is no oxygen in the room, because real laws can't be broken.
Reading example 2, our alien (whom we have to assume is a healthy intelligent being from a healthy intelligent culture for this thought experiment to work) would think, "okay this thing is a material object that's found inside other material objects or constructs, we get the fact that it smells of some material substance, but we can't see how it is used for defense, equality or protection? (maybe they shove it down predators' throats or block their vision with it?)
People do something on it, called 'voting' (maybe a kind of dance?) and for some reason this paper talks (it makes declarative statements and describes facts about something called 'legal') -we don't yet know what a 'legal' is; maybe it's a part of a human body?"
...These are the kind of limitations the unconscious has. There's no way to change it with logic either, because as soon as we try, the unconscious awareness of reality will come up in opposition. In real life nothing can guarantee freedom, protection or equality except intelligence and the ability to interact. If our path to entelechy is inhibited by things, events or creatures, those things or creatures are not intelligent and we should avoid them, ignore them, build huts out of them, or eat them. It's a totally practical animal.
It can't make any sense of an abstract idea being able to 'make all men equal', because in real life that's impossible. Our abstract ideas are only a preliminary for creativity -an idea can't do anything by itself.
The only thing IRL that could 'make' all men equal is all men being equal (ie, exactly the same), and they're not. We are all equal to different tasks and challenges, but we are most blatantly in nature's eyes not equal (indeed, humanity would come to a rapid end if we were, so our alien is likely to be confused by us even desiring such a thing. Of course we see that he simply doesn't understand -but our task in understanding the unconscious is to see WHY he doesn't undertand.)
From these examples we can hopefully see how a rule of 'no abstraction' limits unconscious cognition. We cannot give the alien a picture of a horse and say 'this is a horse'. We have to say 'this is a picture of a horse'. We have to say the absolute literal truth. If we can grasp that, we've got it.
getting out of the matrix...
In absolute literal truth, 'society' is something that anxious people build when culture goes wrong, and society's 'ideal world' is not only not the real world, it removes our access to the real world and our minds dumb down accordingly.
This is the whole problem -society is based on fantasy and fiction and underlying basic beliefs that are quite simply not true; and it's uncannily similar to many religious cults. This is the biggest most difficult anxiety-raising concept for people to grasp and many never do. So we're boldly going where not many have gone before, in considering it, because fear of letting go of that illusion will stop many in their tracks at exactly this point.
I'm going to stop here, and answer the rest later, before I talk everyone's ass off. Once again thanks loads. We appear to be currently co-authoring future tutorials by accident : )
Best,
AR
*For a great cultural psychology lecture on rights which is absolutely true, see George Carlin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWiBt-pqp0E