Soubrette said:
OK GP - I'm very susceptible to guilt.
That's your super-ego in action, Sou
One comment I want to make about something that BillyTK said 
Do we have a subconscious? - or do we just think we do? 
Well, like I said, it's a model--a useful model nonetheless, but with limitations. However, there's something called Social Representations, which are shared concepts, beliefs and assumptions we use to make sense of ourselves and the world around us; so you get something like Freud's conscious/subconscious/unconscious concept which people take and amend to apply to everyday situations. For instance, my old HCI tutor beleived his brain was a computer and behaved on that basis; I, as a lapsed catholic, rationalise my behaviour in terms of having to compensate for an over-active superego (the guilt-making bit of Freud's trinity). So the way we perceive ourselves affects our perception of reality--in doing so, does it make what we perceive about ourselves "real"?
I cannot deny that sometimes on reflection, the reasons I had for doing something appear to be a little different than that which I thought at the time.
This one's kind of easy--memory's also a bit of a slippery weasel as well, and we've got a tendency to edit the memory of our intentions in response to the reception our behaviour elicited. But we've also got a tendency to rationalise our intentions in anticipation of how we'd like that behaviour to be perceived. It's only later we realise we were, after all, acting like jeks. Or I do anyway
I also watch other people act in a way which is a bloody obvious self justification yet they believe what they are saying implicitly.
This ability to hide what we obviously perceive as unpalatable truths about ourselves is something that I am happy to label subconsciousness. But if we don't label it that - then what do we label it as?
Or is there an "it" to label
Sou
Again--a fairly easy one to explain using a couple of concepts, cognitive dissonance and the fundamental attribution error. Very very simply, cognitive dissonance arises as a result between the perception and reality of a thing, and so people use a number of strategies to reduce this dissonance. One of the handiest ways uses the fundamental attribution error; this error is that people/things we like are innately good and any bad things they cause is the result of external factors; but people/things we don't like are innately bad, and any good they cause is because of external factors.
So if you tell me a few home-truths about me, these would innevitably cause me some degree of cognitive dissonance because after all, I am the epitome of sweetness and light. If I like you, then I would rationalise that you're only saying such because you're under the weather/having a hard time/stressed etc etc, but if I didn't like you, then you would be telling me these things because you're a tosser (which I'm sure you're not btw
).
Human behaviour-wise I'm a determinist--I believe that behaviour is a result of a complex interaction between past history (learned experiences), meaning (how I rationalise my past experiences) and environment (situational specificity--how particular locations evoke relevant past experiences. I don't believe in free will other than as a necessary political construct. As for free will/determinism in the laws of physics sense, I have no idea!
But the thing about determinism in behaviour is that it's enabling as well as constraining--we're not simply impotent observers of our own behaviour, because without this prior experience to guide our behaviour we'd have no basis for doing anything--it'd take you hours to get out of bed in a morning--even if you knew that you had to! And although the way we attirubute meaning to both our and others actions is problematic, without these strategies we'd go mad with having to deal with even the most casual situation!
