Source: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than You Think – Scientific American Blog Network, by Bernardo Kastrup
is the mere lack of attention enough to assert that a mental process lacks the qualities of experience? Couldn’t a process that escapes the focus of attention still feel like something? Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along? By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that the sensations were conscious?
distinguish between conscious processes that lack re-representation and truly unconscious processes
our partial and tentative explanations for the alleged rise of consciousness may concern merely the rise of metacognition