The value of our unconscious brain

Continuing this post, granted there is a huge unconscious underbelly to much of our thinking and behavior, even within our central executive system, as experimental data amply shows in Chapter 2. Its operation is critical and foundational to our survival and flourishing, and was undoubtedly naturally selected as such. Without it we would be utterly helpless. Plus there's no way we could bring even a fraction of its operation into conscious awareness, nor would that be functionally viable even if we could.

"But we should not get carried away. Some cognitive psychologists go as far as to propose that consciousness is a pure myth, a decorative but powerless feature, like frosting on a cake. All the mental operations that underlie our decisions and behavior, they claim, are accomplished unconsciously. In their view, our awareness is a mere bystander, a backseat driver that contemplates the brain’s unconscious accomplishments but lacks effective powers of its own. As in the 1999 movie The Matrix, we are prisoners of an elaborate artifice, and our experience of living a conscious life is illusory; all our decisions are made in absentia by the unconscious processes within us. The next chapter will refute this zombie theory. Consciousness is an evolved function, I argue—a biological property that emerged from evolution because it was useful. Consciousness must therefore fill a specific cognitive niche and address a problem that the specialized parallel systems of the unconscious mind could not."