If you look at what happens under hallucinogens—most of which act so as to make what is usually unconscious conscious—then it seems as though consciousness is a filter—which selectively eliminates the least important things. Attention is a form of selective consciousness.
Humans function less effectively if their consciousness is continually flooded with sensory inputs that are usually unconscious—since then the important and the unimportant are muddled together.
We are conscious of as little as we are partly because consciousness is a kind of meta-analysis—and is a relatively expensive feature. For systems with limited computational resources, sensory overload can be a big problem—and the filtering done by consciousness represents a large part of the solution.
If you look at what happens under hallucinogens—most of which act so as to make what is usually unconscious conscious—then it seems as though consciousness is a filter—which selectively eliminates the least important things. Attention is a form of selective consciousness.
Humans function less effectively if their consciousness is continually flooded with sensory inputs that are usually unconscious—since then the important and the unimportant are muddled together.
We are conscious of as little as we are partly because consciousness is a kind of meta-analysis—and is a relatively expensive feature. For systems with limited computational resources, sensory overload can be a big problem—and the filtering done by consciousness represents a large part of the solution.