What are we conscious of?

I took this photo of the inside of my tumble dryer when I was trying to fix it, so I could remember where all the wires went...but what does it have to do with consciousness?

If you think about the sorts of things you can be conscious of, you probably think of the objects that are in front of you now, then about the past and future activities that are currently occupying your mind that are significant to you.

In order to understand how consciousness works, we need to understand how the brain represents the otherwise subconscious content of our minds, because this is what consciousness gives us access to.

When you just react to your environment without being conscious of what you are doing (think of any activity you do so often that it is automatic), your brain takes in sensory data and generates, hopefully appropriate, actions of your muscles. The neurons in your brain are wired up in the right way, at the right time, to do the job at hand, subconsciously.

When we become conscious of what we are doing, what we pay attention to is not the real world object, it is the wiring diagram of our own subconscious processing.

For example when I come across a dog (this is our dog, Oscar in the wood next to our farm), I detect the dog and know it is there. This means that I wire up my transient mental processing to work in a way appropriate to the presence of the dog. Perhaps I speak to the dog and stroke it; perhaps I am afraid of it and try to avoid it. When I introspect, I feel that I know the dog exists. Actually what I know exists is the wiring up that my brain does to itself when there is a dog around.

So in my model of conscious processing, the starting point is to understand how the brain wires itself up to do subconscious processing, since it is that wiring diagram that consciousness gives us access to.

Oh, and I never did get the tumble dryer working.