RE: In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus
May 16, 2025 at 10:42 am
(This post was last modified: May 16, 2025 at 11:35 am by John 6IX Breezy.)
(May 16, 2025 at 8:11 am)Belacqua Wrote: This is not exactly subliminal or subconscious, because once it's pointed out it's obvious. But I do think that a lot of people absorb the subtext in an uncritical way.
These are interesting examples. I think the first thing I would point out is that both of your examples are occurring within conscious experience. The child is consciously attending to the dancing letters; the issue is that they are learning something different than what the producers intended. The second is similar in that people are consciously processing the superhero stories. But in this case, you are highlighting something interesting about stories themselves, which is that they serve as analogies and metaphors, which helps guide behavior and persuade people, but it has to happen consciously. So, a person isn't going to read Animal Farm and come to any conclusions about totalitarian regimes, unless they know about and live in a totalitarian regime and makes a conscious connection between the two, otherwise animal fam is just about farm animals.
An example of unconscious processing in psychology is something like blindsight where the person is fully blind, or at least consciously blind, but can still navigate a space somewhat effectively. But you can still physically trace the movement of information from the retina to connections in areas of the brain that are outside direct conscious experience.