Consciousness is always awareness-after-the-fact

I beg, of course, to differ!Con quoted me (correctly) as saying "a process of thought must be in place before we become consciously aware".Let me expound that idea somewhat: When the volcano erupts, has the tsunami begun? Surely all we have, at first, is a landslide; a lanslide is not a wave, and it's not a tsunami. As the material tumbles down the side of the volcano, a process is in motion that will wipe out a ton of villagers, but the tsunami hasn't begun yet. I suppose that the tsunami begins as the initial rock-fall drags water molecules downwards - there is the inception of the wave! As yet, no villagers are hurt; still the mighty wave must cross the great ocean. Is one conscious of the thought at this point in the analagous story?I am sure that nobody is conscious of a brainwave at its inception; that, I suppose, is the entire point that I'm making. The purpose of the brainwave is certainly not (originally) to achieve your self-awareness (which is a cool by-product of the brain); it's more like a signal to all around asking "have you got any ideas harmonious with this one?"; when a part of the brain resonantes with such a pattern, it fires in a special way that creates its own causal chain of ripples from this new point (this is all sub-conscious).The key to seeing my point is to realise that consciousness is distributed across neurons and that a brainwave is distributed in time. That consciousness is distributed across neurons is equivalent to my rejection of "perceiving tissue"; there are no special "consciousness neurons". That the brainwave is distributed in time means that the meaning can predate any consequence; note that not all thoughts make it to self-conscious awareness... so as the brain is having a thought, your consciousness is not aware of it at first... how could it be? You'd be swamped by tens of thousands of false-starts and mini-ideas every second! Only ideas (think of them like ripples) that survive long enough and large enough ever make it into self-conscious awareness. The self-awareness follows on from the self-being.Has anybody ever had the experience of working on a puzzle of one form or another subconsciously? This happens to me a lot, with crosswords, or trying to remember a fact, or a date, or a name... the puzzle is something that you dedicate all your effort to for a while, can't solve, so you give up.Half an hour later, in the middle of dinner, you suddenly and incongruously announce to the table (or keep it quiet) "AMANDA! that was the name I was looking for"! You realise that, in fact, your subconscious mind has been plugging away in the background, looking for answers... you were not conscious of that fact... you weren't choosing this to be the case... you weren't driving that process (nor could you stop it at will).Occasionally, before you found your answer, you might have had hints that the subconscious hunt was going on, though... you might have noticed that when somebody else said "they haven't named the baby yet", your brain resonated with the idea a little strongly (since it was still engaged in a hunt for a name) and you were distracted enough by a quick reverie that you missed the part of the conversation that your friend was talking about the parents considering "Zoltan, destroyer of Worlds" (which had caused the table to laugh, bringing your conscious focus back into the room).And how about that final moment when you catch the answer? Maybe something about your conversation with your friends did jog a memory; perhaps a friend was saying "It's a bit like Francis Drake fighting the Spanish armada mumble mumble bleur bleur..." - the rest of your friend's sentence is lost by another little reverie that can be later explained in words as "armada? armada...? amada... AMANDA!".My point in this story being that your subconscious may be up to a number of things without your knowledge and it's only when the subconscious "thinks it's onto something" that your conscious mind becomes aware; only, I don't think that we should seperate the two as strongly as that, in the sense that there's no homunculus and the subconscious mind doesn't have to "signal" to the conscious mind since they are one and the same physical thing.Here's an analogy for what I'm describing (it's really hard to put some of these ideas into words, bear with me!):Self-consciousness is like a resonance; it's like an echo; it's like a feedback loop... we are self-aware of the loudest part of the brain (the most echoey part) at any given time.So, here's my entire idea in a nutshell: think of a thought as being like a whisper in a great hall, competing with many other quiet noises for space - this whisper gets caught in a particular niche and echoes; it is boosted, like a pinball stuck between two mushrooms, gaining a beautiful resonance before fading and being replaced by louder noises throughout the hall. Consciousness is that resonance.Now, answer me this: when exactly did consciousness start? When the whisper was once whispered? When the whisper first found the perfect niche to resonate in? Upon powering up on the pinball mushrooms? The first bounce, or the second?Since we're now talking about a sound wave, the medium is compressive waves in air so, by analogy, the neurons are like the air molecules in this great hall. Which air molecule moving was responsible for the resonance? What good does it do us to look at this level of detail?The shape of the hall is a complex space, with niches and balconies and storeys and rooms and great flights of stairs and statues; the shape of the hall is your personality, your history, your memory. The air is made up of one hundred billion neurons. Whispers pass through your great hall, tiny chatters between adjacent pockets of air; occasionally whispers find the perfect shape in the wall and bounce around in a positive feedback loop producing strange harmonies. These strange harmonies are your consciousness. These harmonies can come from anywhere in the great hall; a room dedicated to music may occasionally sing out; another time, a buzz may come from the kitchen - and that particular buzz might reach a statue on a wall in a dark recess on the top floor that has remained silent for years but now converts it into a beautiful hum, singing a beautiful song that hasn't been heard for years.I do apologise for taking my sweet time building up enough analogies to convey my meaning, but I fear that it's a complex model that I have in my head and I'm only really committing it to the scrutiny of others for the first time in this debate!So, I think I'm there (I hope I'm there) - I trust that the gentle reader will find food for thought. Perhaps one or two gentle readers may actually end up agreeing with me that it's as hard to tell when consciousness actually happened as it is to tell which was the last wave before the tide changed direction; furthermore, to all intents and purposes, speaking plainly, we might reasonably say:"Consciousness is always awareness after the fact (even when the fact is your own thoughts)"If you're still not convinced, please spend a few minutes going back over what I've said about resonance. Allow me just my analogy of consciousness being resonance in a great hall of whispers and I think you'll see my meaning. I hope that you do; the thought of it quite tickled me with its beauty.