Introduction
– Unconsciousness is not too complicated to use in everyday talk, but not so simple that we can put a bridle on it. It sits somewhere between mystery and familiarity, between the reachable and the untouchable. Enough depth to keep pulling you in, enough vagueness to never let you settle. Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, sociology — everyone tries to catch it, define it, cage it.
– We usually picture it as a layer beneath consciousness. Something underneath. Something hidden. Something that navigates our behaviour while we look somewhere else. The iceberg picture. The shadow. The “real you” behind the scenes.
– This article tries to overturn this picture and, at the same time, redefine it within a new framework:
– Try to overturn:
Unconsciousness is not a layer beneath consciousness.
It is not a hidden room/castle behind our vision.
It is not a process that makes/causes/touches all of our consciousness states.
We are not passengers driven by unconsciousness.
– Instead:
Unconsciousness is a collection of mental states that are unmanifested/potential.
Every mental state could be an unconscious state; it doesn’t matter how important or how deep it is for us, or whether it is just a simple, everyday mental state.
It changes constantly; every moment, our unconsciousness is different from the moment before.
Distance from what we could be at a given moment is central to defining unconsciousness.
– From here, two questions arise, both at the heart of this paper:
What is the meaning beneath consciousness? Or, where is unconsciousness?
And also, what is unconsciousness made of? Is it just a process of mind/brain, or mental states, or just some huge emotional experience, or …?
– Most approaches to unconsciousness — Freudian, folk psychology, neuroscience, … — try to tell us how unconsciousness works. They tell beautiful stories, but:
When asked where unconsciousness is and what it is made of, their answers are not interesting/convincing enough to be trusted. The devil shows itself / comes out once you ask for details.
– Here, I try to redefine unconsciousness with the help of the book: The Repository of Understandings (2025), by Arbabi. I try to overturn some presuppositions in order to set up a new framework.
Shall we start? ….
Unconsciousness: a term with several faces
– The most famous face of unconsciousness is the Freudian face. A sophisticated, beautiful face, behind which dark/scary secrets hide. Freudians have become a major part of almost any (general) discussion of unconsciousness. After that, (folk) psychologists, cognitive scientists (neuroscience) and … have started to build their own views of it.
– For Freud, unconsciousness is something repressed, as a high-pressure dumping ground. Toxic thoughts, forbidden urges, and past trauma are locked away because the mind cannot handle them, forcing their way out sideways through dreams, symptoms, slips of the tongue.
– For psychology, a bit after Freud, it is not a dumping ground; it is like a second person living in your brain. A mystical force that knows your “true self,” that carries deep creative wisdom. The hidden self, the alter ego.
– For a modern scientific approach (neuroscience), the unconscious is not something mysterious to deal with; the term itself is replaced by “non-conscious process”. Just the brain running background programs. Balance, vision, blood sugar, all handled below the one thing your attention can hold at a time. No secrets, just autopilot.
– Despite all differences, some similarities hold:
All see the mind as an iceberg, consciousness the tip, something larger beneath. All treat the conscious mind as a bottleneck/slow/limited while the unconscious runs a massive number of operations in parallel.
All agree that unconsciousness drives behaviour, each in its own idiom. For example:
– Freud: repressed trauma sabotages your relationships.
– Folk psychology: your gut tells you who to trust.
– Neuroscience: your basal ganglia and amygdala move your body before your conscious mind registers the danger.
– In all models:
You are a passenger. Unconsciousness is driving.
– All models agree:
The hidden material is not sealed off permanently; it crosses into awareness through context.
Like a slip of the tongue, a hypnotic trance, a dream, a sudden crisis, or a change in brain chemistry, there is always a door.
– All of this is, in its own way, trying to support naive intuition:
Unconsciousness is larger than consciousness.
It shapes what we are and do beyond what we see in an aware state and is always context-related.
– People use unconsciousness to anticipate their own actions, and just as often to justify them.
Why didn’t I say no? Why do I keep trusting people who hurt me? Why this anxiety, in this room, with these people?
We need stories to explain ourselves to ourselves, and most approaches to unconsciousness supply the material, especially for what we don’t like (want to change) about our own behaviour.
– But of the two questions we asked before ¾ especially “where unconsciousness is” ¾ none of these approaches likes to talk about it.
They believe (mostly explicitly and less implicitly) unconsciousness is a sort of process, like any physiological process in our brain.
– Process is a fine definition as far as it goes: input, activation, output. Like the process that lets your eyes see. Acceptable. But not very interesting.
– Freud and folk psychology, even where they lean on process, both mean that unconsciousness is something bigger than a process. Why?
Because they expect an unconscious state to eventually become conscious, and a process alone never does.
Because unconsciousness is always related to consciousness; the iceberg metaphor shows that it is intertwined with consciousness.
But picture unconsciousness as a process, it is like digestion, or any physiological activity when we see a bird: it can make a mental state, or affect it, but it cannot become a conscious state itself.
So, it cannot be unconsciousness either, because unconsciousness can, and should, be conscious eventually.
Here, I am using unconsciousness in a narrower sense: not everything that happens without consciousness, but the unmanifested part of the space of mental states.
– So, if unconsciousness is more than a process, the question returns: where is it? What is it built with, exactly?
Even in Freud’s own terms, sexual drives, aggressive urges, trauma, locked away somewhere and surfacing in dreams and behaviour, where, exactly, is that somewhere?
Is unconsciousness itself changing, or is there a fixed repository whose contents change?
What decides, or how do we decide, that something belongs to the unconscious and something else doesn’t?
If there is a criterion, unconsciousness can affect the criterion too, which then affects unconsciousness, a loop with no outside.
– My question is not how unconsciousness works. Every approach above already answers that beautifully. My question is where it is, and how it got there. Framed this way, the clarity these approaches promise falls away. And after that, we can explain how it works.
– Now, let me introduce a new framework.
Two Collections/Spaces of Mental States
First collection: all manifested mental states
– Each moment we are in one mental state (it could be anything). Each moment we are in one unique situation, which leads/provides us with one unique mental state. It could be a thought, a belief, a feeling, a sense, an emotion, a dream, …
A moment after a moment, having a mental state after a mental state, being in a situation after a situation. (It doesn’t matter how long it takes: a moment, a second, a few seconds, a minute, a few minutes, or more.)
Something like a flowing stream of consciousness (James).
– Now, imagine that all of the mental states one can have are in one collection: the First Collection.
Every mental state/understanding a person has across their whole life. A track of a lifetime.
There are a lot of mental states, but ultimately not an infinite number of them; counting them is not impossible.
The whole collection of mental states a grandma has had from her childhood to now, as a collection, can be seen together. All of the changes, all the thinking, senses, beliefs, …
It can be one possible definition/imagination of a “person”. What imagination do we have of a being called a “person”? A possible answer could be this:
A collection of all of the mental states one actually has (all of the situations someone actually is in).
– All actual mental states one has are related to consciousness. It is the territory of the conscious mind.
But, how about unconsciousness? From here, the paper shifts to the second collection of mental states, which is related to unconsciousness.
Second collection: an infinity of unmanifested mental states
– We already know a lot of things. Think about all of the information/beliefs/thoughts/knowledge/feelings/experiences/… we have read, learned, seen, heard, touched, smelled, intuited, … They are somewhere, and somehow, they work.
Even the trauma we have, the unspeakable experiences we have, down to the simple ideas, thoughts, feelings we have.
A whole world sitting within us (almost Mawlana).
When we are in one conscious mental state, all of these things are unconscious.
And every unconscious state can become conscious.
– So…
We know Melbourne is a city in Australia. Or, we know white storks do not carry newborn babies.
A question: Where is this information when we think about something else?
Where are all of the unmanifested mental states when we have just one actual mental state?
– It (unmanifested mental states) could be more like things we already know.
You don’t know all of the sentences you may encounter, but to some extent you would almost know the meaning of them.
You don’t already know all of the mental states you may possibly face, but you will be in one unique mental state (at t1) when you are in that particular situation.
– Every mental state a person could have at one specific moment (t1). Only one of them actually happens. One of the members of the First Collection, but …
But instead of this mental state, instead of being in a certain situation, we could have had an infinite number of possible situations and had another mental state.
From tasting a new ice cream, to seeing a cheating partner, to exploring a new idea, to falling down, to being bitten by a giant in a dream, to…
Meaning, in one moment we have one actual mental state and infinite other possible mental states, because instead of being in this situation we could have been in countless others.
Consider a stone (a strange example): it could be in a lot of potential situations that are not happening now. For example, that it can dissolve in water is not something the stone is doing, but it is still part of what the stone can be.
In a similar way, the mental states we could have had in other situations are not actual now, but they are still part of “what we can be” / “who we are”.
– Now, freeze a moment! One has an active mental state, the situation they are actually in, and an infinite number of mental states they could have had if they were in different situations.
A space/collection of infinite mental states, of which just one is actual/manifested, and the rest are unmanifested/potential, in one moment.
If mind is nothing but this collection at t1, if we can somehow say that talking about mind means talking about all mental states (including everything) in t1.
If the mind is also understood through what it can be, not only through what it actually is, then the unmanifested part of this space is not nothing. Then unconsciousness…
Unconsciousness is nothing but all of the unmanifested mental states. All the mental states that could potentially be, instead of the actual one.
In other words: infinite mental states; just one of them active, the rest unconsciousness.
This does not mean that an infinite number of mental states are stored somewhere like objects. It means that:
At a given moment, the space of what a person could mentally be is not exhausted by the one state that is actual.
– Let’s call this space/collection the Personal Cognitive World. A space holding every understanding a person could have at a given moment, across every possible situation. One is active. The rest sit in potential/unmanifested.
I will explain what I mean next.
Space of Mental States as Personal Cognitive World
– The personal cognitive world sits close to character.
Everything you are (beliefs, desires, personal history, and culture) shapes your mental state when faced with a situation. Based on who you are, you have a certain mental state.
And, of course, this mental state / situation shapes your beliefs, history, culture; shapes who you are. So it is a mutual relationship.
If someone wants to talk about character as a term, to talk about who you are — the Socratic question — they would, as a plausible answer, consider all of the possible mental states someone could have. But how is it possible to consider all mental states?
– Here, our categorising of mental states into two spaces could be useful.
First collection: a track of life is a collection of what you actually were at each moment, but it doesn’t show what you could have been if a different situation had happened…
For drawing what the character of one person is, we should consider all “what if …” situations, which tell us who/what someone/something exactly is.
– Second collection: it could tell us, at every moment, all the possible mental states you would have in different situations.
If someone can imagine this collection/space (a shadow of the imagination of this unimaginable space/collection), they come closest to describing what the cognitive world / character of one person is in a moment.
Of course, the next moment, a different world is there, but (likely) like the previous.
– In a nutshell: the collection of every such unique mental state, across every possible moment, is the nearest thing to a definition of who we/you are.
Each moment, you have a different collection of unmanifested mental states.
One unique mental state exists because all your other possible/unmanifested mental states, in other situations, exist alongside it.
– It is odd, but I want to consider/imagine this:
You feel sad in that moment, but at this moment you could potentially be happy, or just see a chair, be hungry, dream, talk, …, read a book, …, swim in the ocean, …
All of these mental states are unique, they are blended with a lot of senses, experiences, beliefs, … which you have simply because your personal experience, your view, your desires, your …, are unique.
If even one of these mental states were different, then it would not belong to you. This changes all of the space/collection of mental states, including the active one.
– Feel shy, face turns red, at a sarcastic remark, with exactly that shade of shyness blended with whatever else is moving through you. That specific mental state is only what it is because of its relation to the mental state you’d have facing a monster in a dream, or seeing a dead bird, or hearing criticism from your boss. Not interchangeable. Coherent with each other, all part of the same world; your world/ your persona / your cognitive world.
Together, active and unmanifested, they form the personal cognitive world.
– Now, except for one active mental state, all of the unmanifested/potential mental states could be considered unconscious mental states at t1.
They (unconscious states) are mental states which could become active (conscious); their being unmanifested does not mean that they are already occurring somewhere outside consciousness; it means that they belong to what the person could be in another situation.
They are involved in/shape what we are and what we think each moment; they are changing constantly (a change explained in the section on distance below), and they are not a mysterious layer on/in/under the mind/consciousness, but something addressable/reachable.
– In fact, all of the “what if …” situations and mental states that could be active make up our unconsciousness, no matter how dark, mysterious, secretive, disgusting or valuable they are; how real or delusional; how important or trivial. All of them build our cognitive world, in which every mental state lives.
So what if smelling Indian food is, at t1, part of our unconsciousness, as well as being afraid of white bed sheets (because of some childhood trauma), to… All of these mental states, regardless of how important they are, are part of our unconsciousness.
– Even though common sense believes some mental states are more valuable for us, some have more impact on our other mental states, while others do not have, for a person who has them, such a big influence.
For a person at t1, some of the unmanifested mental states are more important, have more depth, and make up a bigger part of who they are, but some of the unmanifested mental states do not have such a role for the person. So, …
A question arises: how does the framework evaluate mental states? How are all of the mental states at t1 related to each other? How do we figure out that one of them has more depth than another?
Distance in the Space of Mental States
– Let me use your imagination to address the questions above.
– Imagine you are in a mental state at t1 that is a joyful feeling from seeing a scene in a movie, which may remind you of something personal from your past. Your actual mental state is this sense, of course blended with a lot of personal experience.
Based on what I have said up to this point, instead of this mental state, you could be in countless other mental states.
But the chances of these mental states happening are not the same. The chance of a sense of fear/wonder/confusion arising from seeing a lion talking to you is not the same as the chance of enjoying your drink. Still, the chance of accepting a talking lion in your dream is higher than when you are awake.
– The chance of having a certain mental state depends on the context, on your cognitive background, your culture, and … For example, accepting a talking tree is more likely for people thousands of years ago than for people in modern times.
All I want to say now is this: having a certain mental state means a lot of conditions happening at that moment. So considering this, the chance of some mental states happening instead of this one is different (more/less) than for other potential mental states.
– Let’s use “distance” instead of chance of happening. We can say every mental state has to traverse a distance to happen (to be the next mental state among countless mental states). The distance it has to traverse is not the same; depending on the situation, it could be more or less.
Say you are in mental state A. You could, potentially, meet countless situations B (B1, B2, … Bn). Meeting one gives you a mental state AB, one of countless possible ABs. Only one is actual; the rest unmanifested. Not all ABs are equally likely. That likelihood depends on A, on where you already are.
Distance is part of AB, not fixed to it, not separate from it. The Bs available to A and A’s distance to them, both shift as A shifts. So the set of ABs at t1 is not the set of ABs at t2. Ordinary language and imagination struggle to hold this picture steady.
– In a dangerous situation, some mental states sit closer than others. In sleep, mental states far from waking awareness sit close (like the sense of falling from a building). Betrayal by a partner shortens the distance to hatred and anger and lengthens it from the love you started with.
Put a person through radical shifts — wealth, loss of everything, illness, the death of someone close — and record the states that surface. That record is their unconsciousness.
– Every mental state you are not in belongs to this collection. All unmanifested states, not only the repressed ones Freud names, but the unimportant, the misunderstood, the illusions, and beliefs tied to situations you are not in right now.
And the whole collection shifts moment to moment because what happens at t1 changes your distance to everything at t2.
– Some potential mental states are far from reaching, far from describing, far from having. For example:
You are far from having the feeling of tasting ice cream as a child. Or we are far from having a sense of admiration for a stone, the way people thousands of years ago did when they thought it was a kind of god.
To have these senses, we need a system/an atmosphere/a structure of understanding to hold that kind of belief, which we don’t have now, so we are too far from this kind of mental state.
Even if we can be close in this sense, like having some childlike feeling, it is more like an intuition, something passing, something you can barely hold in your hand, and definitely can’t explain or describe.
So this explains why, even knowing we are afraid of a white bedsheet, it is not like having/accessing that fear, the way we have a simple feeling of humour when we see a comedy.
– I mean, when we are far from some mental states, explaining them, describing them, finding their structure is difficult, and this explains why people work on some deep feelings; they try to reach them because they want to have less and less distance from having them.
Having some mental states articulated (in language, in behaviour, in …) is easier; for others you only get a sense of them, one you can barely catch, like a joyful feeling from childhood that you smell once or twice in your adult life.
Having some suppressed ones is far out of reach; they need footholds to come up.
This is why distance matters: it is the shape of unconsciousness itself.
In a Nutshell
– Here, I try to redefine unconsciousness as something imaginable, which can show the following:
Unconscious states could be conscious; they are not just a process (of the mind/brain).
They are not just fixed/constant, but constantly changing.
They are not selective; they are not just important/suppressed/milestone experiences/dark secrets, hidden somewhere in the depths of the mind. At each moment, except for the one that is active, all of the mental states someone has at t1 are unconscious states. A collection/space of mental states at t1.
– By introducing “distance” as a new term, we can measure how far unmanifested mental states are from happening, from becoming actual in the next moment.
Some of them depend on the situation (like culture, personal experiences, the quality of our present circumstances, the quality of our own presence, …) and have more distance from happening at t2.
This explains why experience, culture, relationships, and even a shift in the wider society reshape a person’s unconsciousness. Not by adding or removing hidden content, but by changing distance.
Distance is not incidental to a mental state; it is part of it.
Every experience, every belief, every action, everything seen or heard, resets your distance to what remains unmanifested.
Unconsciousness, on this account, is the collection of every mental state you would have had, had you been somewhere else, at this same moment. Infinite, unmanifested. Defined entirely by its distance from the one state that is actually yours.
– Reaching some mental states requires building footholds. For example, having a mental state like the joy of a drink is not difficult, but grasping some trauma from childhood requires more effort.
This explains why, while psychological approaches cannot explain unconsciousness satisfactorily, they (sometimes) can succeed in bringing up some old senses; they somehow just make a foothold.
Like novels do for our culture, they bring up unmanifested states (an unfaithful feeling, a new Nazi party ruling the country, …) that are far from active in our conscious culture, working as a collective thought experiment for our society.
– So unconsciousness is not a hidden layer or a buried archive; it is the shifting space of everything you almost were.
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