I'd like to contest the use of the term "actual" pilot for the the more deliberate pilot.
For some reason, we as humans seem to like thinking of our conscious / deliberate pilot as ourselves, and the subconscious / autopilot as some form of "Other" somehow cohabiting our bodies.
(I'd expect this viewpoint to be especially true for the academic / programmer crowd here on Hacker News, who stereotypically tend to be more skilled in logical / deliberate forms of thought, and comparatively lacking in the intuitive / automatic, such as social skills).
However, the subconscious is as much YOU as the part of which you are more aware, and, in fact, probably has a GREATER effect on your action. In conclusion, the autopilot is as deserving of the term "actual" pilot, as the deliberate pilot is.
You can’t just say it’s “as much YOU” as an argument against the autopilot analogy. A plane’s autopilot is still part of the plane as well and will also likely have a greater effect on the action (of flying the plane) than the actual pilot.
derangedHorse has a good reply to this (not that these are new arguments, eg "can the foot say because I am not the eye I am not part of the body?")
I was not referring to the subconscious as autopilot. To stretch this already tenuous analogy further the subconscious would be the flight control software.
I'm saying during our waking supposedly conscious experience our conscious selves (pilot) is actually rarely in control. Most of our choices are automatic (autopilot) and the conscious mind retroactively invents rational explanations for them when we bother to notice them at all.
Free will (if it exists) is probably almost entirely contained within the ability of the pilot to repeatedly tweak the autopilot settings, which is entirely indirect and a far smaller degree of control than we like to suppose.
If you consider evolution this isn't so surprising. Intelligence is just one strategy for adaptation and evolution repurposes and builds on top of existing structures. Why wouldn't the rational conscious mind evolve as a tweak on top of an unconscious intelligence, which itself is a tweak on top of subconscious/instinctual behavior? If animal studies are proving anything it's that intelligence is a spectrum and many supposedly human behaviors (concept of self, tool use, et al) are present in other species.
For some reason, we as humans seem to like thinking of our conscious / deliberate pilot as ourselves, and the subconscious / autopilot as some form of "Other" somehow cohabiting our bodies.
(I'd expect this viewpoint to be especially true for the academic / programmer crowd here on Hacker News, who stereotypically tend to be more skilled in logical / deliberate forms of thought, and comparatively lacking in the intuitive / automatic, such as social skills).
However, the subconscious is as much YOU as the part of which you are more aware, and, in fact, probably has a GREATER effect on your action. In conclusion, the autopilot is as deserving of the term "actual" pilot, as the deliberate pilot is.