I think the biggest reason I disagree with that is from the experience of extensive music training. I can play instruments almost automatically, and think about other stuff while playing now. But it took years and years of careful, conscious work to train my subconscious and muscles and hands to be able to do that...

While you can develop actions and skills to the point where you can do them without needing almost any conscious input, it just seems ridiculous to say there's no control from the conscious part of the mind and it's just an illusion...

That doesn’t seem to contradict the first explanation. It’s not surprising that your subconscious mind could acquire abilities due to practice initiated by your conscious mind, just like it’s not surprising that your muscles can grow due to exercise initiated by your conscious mind.

You are missing the radical claim being made here. Your conscious mind only discovers you are playing an instrument by observing that you are doing it.

Yeah, that much of the conscious work is while actually sitting down and playing was kinda implied (some is theory though but mostly while physically practicing).

You presume that subconsciousness is something unified and, hm, intelligent. While in reality it seems to be a complex collection of more or less elaborate procedures that were learned partly under supervision of consciousness. Moreover, consciousness (that is you) has veto power (there's research on that). If you predict that your "subconscious guy" will do some dumb thing (like flipping light switch during blackout), you can override it and with enough overrides "the guy" will learn to be a bit less dumb (the procedure will be adjusted to take more context into account).

Of course, "you" isn't magic, it's just another procedure, but it has potential access to the entirety of stored knowledge (including knowledge about procedures that weren't yet internalized into subconsciousness).

You are close, but there is a subtle problem.

Most people do not really believe that the subconscious impacts our decisions. They may even theoretically say they do, but in practice their executive function believes it decided the decisions that were really done subconsciously.

Ironically, if you believe that you are making the decisions, you cannot override them, and then you are actually not making the decisions.

The key to free will is to really understand that you do not have it.

I don't see anything actionable in "you have no free will" statement to care to deeply internalize it. Regardless of a flavor of "free will" interpretation.

It is a good idea anyway not to internalize such a fundamental idea based on comments by a random person on the internet, regardless of whether it is actionable or not.

It just appeared to me that this question is something that interests you, so I wanted to point you to a direction that I have found helpful.

The general process, which appears to be common to various approaches, is to practice specific kind of meditation long enough that you start to see your automatic reactions to the sub-consciously made decisions to slow down, so you are in a way creating room for something before the immediate reaction, and then you can verify the truth in what I describe by yourself. So there is no need to believe what I say or nothing directly actionable that I can transmit through this medium that would be helpful to you.

Few books I have found interesting on the subject: Gallwey: Inner Game of Tennis, Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous, Nicoll: Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

Presuming that the subconscious isn’t all there is and the “conscious” mind isn’t just an illusion created by all the subconscious processes.

It would be interesting to see experiments that try to pry back the lid a bit on the line between conscious and the subconscious and the communication therein.

They must be out there.

That makes me think, if consciousness is an illusion of the subconscious, then what's the difference in terms of outward effect on the world? We're all philosophical zombies then technically since consciousness in this scenario doesn't exist.

The illusion is that concious part of the brain is the most important one. In reality we rely mostly on intuition and body automation.

But it's pretty obvious to me that consciousness would not exist if it was not useful.

One way it would be useful if unconcious mind made an automated decision and then ran it through conscious mind to ensure that it was a correct one.

The difference is that if you really understand, realize that it is an illusion, it becomes possible to change the situation.

Or there isn't. Takes a whole new meaning to "Don't bullshit yourself".

My subconscious likes to slip in triggers to play melodies from songs related somehow to events along with the control commands sometimes.