Why must conscious biological creatures be made of predominantly unconscious stuff? Is not the answer to this within the realm of our daily experience?
The answer is simple. To avoid unnecessary and expensive bureaucracy. Imagine a brain where everything is micromanaged from a centralized command and control center. It would be crushed by the complexity of the task.
The brain is composed of a multitude of unconscious processes. Each process disseminating indications of inconsistencies in its predictions to other processes. The purpose of this information distribution is to ensure the homeostasis of the whole brain.
Thus only a sliver of information rises to the level of conscious awareness. It is only the information that has been determined to be evolutionarily useful that is communicated. The brain is efficient because its parts do not have to talk so much.
So the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness is an absurd notion that consciousness is measured by the degree of integration. It's parroting a formulation that is based on a command and control center of process coordination.
One can argue that it seems counterintuitive that the brain has no master controller. But this is borne from a cognitive bias of an illusion of control. The world's economy keeps humming along without a central command and control structure. Decentralized coordination works.
But decentralized coordination works because each agent is involved in its own private concerns. In other words, the parts themselves are also conscious.
Just like a government is unable to peer into the minds of its citizens, our consciousness isn't able to peer into the 'consciousness' of the subconscious parts that make up our brains.
To make this easier, let's define consciousness as attention and awareness. Our consciousness cannot attend to or is aware of what its parts are attending to and aware of. It's hidden from external introspection.
It is hidden because there is no biological purpose for it to be exposed and even if it is exposed it would mean that the introspecting whole can have a proper framing of the information of its parts. The architecture just blows up with unnecessary complexity.
Like any complex problem-solving behavior, the brain solves problems by dividing and conquering. It does not need the extra bureaucracy required to maintain an illusion of control. After all, it's its own brain and surely it trusts what the parts are doing.
The interesting thing though is that even our reasoning process is also a subconscious process. This is a surprising observation that many cannot believe. But if you work out the logic for yourself, you will realize that it also makes sense.
What appears to be a conscious cognitive process consists of many subconscious processes each competing for your conscious attention. But how does a conscious process know what to attend to? Is it conscious of that attending process?
Apparently, a conscious process just subconsciously knows what is important to attend to. Hence it's also subconscious. The only artifact that we are aware of is what we are presently attending to. How we got to attending to it is outside our awareness.
Does it make sense that we have a conscious process to attend to the subconscious attending processes? The ultimate bureaucracy is where every manager attends to every worker's attention. We can make our model simpler if we avoid this kind of bureaucracy.
There are two reasons why bureaucracies emerge. The first is because of an absence of a continuous optimization process. Bureaucracies have processes that are sub-optimal because of many frozen accidents in process design. We don't fix what isn't broken.
The second reason is the opposite of the first. We overly attend to the process, attempting to control what isn't broken. Biological bureaucracy favors the first kind of complexity. Human bureaucracy mixes both kinds.
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