There Is No Such Thing as Unconscious Thought
I think the conclusions the author makes are way too broad.<p>What generates consciousness, appears to me to be a function of what the neurons are all &#x27;doing&#x27;. The brain has two features that are devoted to linguistic processing, and you have to activate them in order to find words for the things you think.<p>Thoughts that &#x27;bubble up&#x27; all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it&#x27;s also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn&#x27;t quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you&#x27;re doing.<p>If you meditate, you can focus on that &#x27;line&#x27; between when thoughts become linguistic and when they don&#x27;t, and if you do trance work, you can block out the sensory world and so generate experiences using &#x27;only&#x27; the mind. From here, you can work out that brain activity becomes conscious at some point.<p>Also, obviously there is brain activity that does not reach consciousness, the brain for example needs to do things like regulate heartbeat, and certain aspects of our experience we&#x27;re only dimly conscious of much of the time. Consciousness is a continuum, not a binary.<p>So our brains can be doing a lot that we&#x27;re not aware of.