What I hear you saying is that when this data emerges into conscious awareness it does so because of a redirection of attention. Would that be accurate?
No, I don't think so.
I'm not sure that "attention" is a very useful concept, actually, unless you want to get more specific about what you mean by it.
(One problem we run into when talking about consciousness is that we invent a lot of short-cuts to make things easier to discuss at a high level of abstraction, and it's easy to start thinking of these short-cuts as actual things or processes in the brain, but really we can only take them so far, as conveniences.)
Again, I'll go back to perception and processing, and see if maybe we can work our way toward "attention".
I'm sitting here in my office, typing at my computer. There are sounds coming from the street, radio news playing in another room, sunlight from outside and fluorescent light from the ceiling, my animals are around somewhere, my body is registering the temperature, air currents, odors, the chair and the keyboard and my clothing, the painful crick in my neck and upper back that I woke up with and the too-large breakfast I'm digesting, and of course my brain is doing God knows what.
At all times, non-conscious processing in my brain is handling input from all these sources and more, routing, matching, and storing.
As I'm typing this, my train of thought -- which is a continual interplay between what I'm thinking of consciously, on the one hand, and supporting processes that I'm not conscious of, on the other -- leads me to want an example of a sensation that I'm not aware of unless I "think about it".
The uneven contour of the chair cushion comes to mind, so I use that as an example.
Now, what has just happened here?
The
consciousness function of my brain, for lack of a better term, obviously has some role in this task of composing and typing this reply.
But the idea "I could use an example of something that I sense but am not aware of unless I think about it" doesn't come from that function. It's "pushed" into that process, so to speak by non-conscious processes that are working hand-in-glove with conscious processing to perform this task.
So... which set of processes moved its "attention" to the contour of the chair cushion?
Well, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the non-conscious processes did so first.
Once the task "find something I'm not aware of unless I think about it" is OK'ed, it's the non-conscious processes that go scanning around for candidates and start pushing them over to the conscious processes.
So these things "occur to me" and I start directing conscious attention to them and deciding (again with the help of the NCPs) which one is the best to use.
I think a better way to look at it is that (pre-processed) information is moved over into conscious processing because it's needed there, in order to do whatever it is that those processes are handling at the moment, or because signals are strong enough to indicate that this stuff is likely part of something that conscious processing should be handling.
For instance, while I'm absorbed in typing, most of the smells that I perceive go unnoticed, including the faint scent of woodsmoke from the fireplace. They get a 3 in the triage hierarchy. But and equally faint scent of burnt food, or burning wire, will be given a 1, and I'll become consciously aware of them.
From an evolutionary point of view, it must be the case, then, that responding to burning food or electrical fires (which I have, through experience, come to associate with those smells) is something that is most successfully handled with the aid of consciousness. Which gives us some insight into what consciousness is, in terms of what it's designed to do.
Compare that to, say, something which looms up quickly near me, or a projectile headed rapidly at my eye.
In those two cases, my body handles the situation non-consciously first. I duck and look toward the looming thing, or I flinch and put up my hand to block the projectile.
Only then do conscious processes join the game for such tasks as figuring out what the wider situation is and what the longer-range response should be.
And I think ultimately that's going to have to be the focus of answering the question "When does information get moved into conscious processing?"
It goes there because pre-conscious modules determine that it's needed in order to do the kinds of things that consciousness helps us to do.
And these types of things tend to involve quickly coordinating very high-level (not finely granular) information, assessing social situations, planning for the future, guessing what other people's (and animals') intentions are, balancing emotional response with intellectual analysis, and so forth.
Consciousness is likely to be something like the hand -- a very useful tool which doesn't have a single purpose. In fact, it's probably only worth the high maintenance cost precisely because it's so flexible and useful for so many tasks that give us a survival edge.
That's why I find the new research on simultaneous activation of spatially separated areas of the brain so intriguing. It fits with what consciousness seems designed for functionally -- to rapidly process big chunks of different kids of highly processed info. In other words, to do what the modularized neural network isn't that good at doing by itself.
And if it does turn out that those global signature waves are the hallmarks of conscious activity, we may also get an answer to why we feel this locus of awareness behind our eyes even though there's nothing in our brains that produces the kinds of physical sensations we get from, say, cricks in our necks.
. This is actually a huge stickler point for me... people generally toss around words like "same" and "different", and whenever I hear these words, I think of something along the lines of "equivalence class", which requires some sort of context. When the context is undefined, it can be difficult to assess whether or not "sameness" has meaning. They absolutely must be the same in some sense, because they are neural. They also must be different in some sense, because they're doing different things.