[LlamaTrauma]

The theory I've developed is that the brain circuitry passes much of the information it processes through a "seat of consciousness", which then processes that data and sends signals back to the unconscious parts of the brain to control motor function, etc. Instinctive action bypasses the seat of consciousness step, but most "important" decisions go through it.

If the unconscious brain is damaged it can impact the data the seat of consciousness receives or reduce how much control consciousness has on the body, depending on if the damage is on the input or output side.

I'm pretty convinced there's something special about the seat of consciousness. An AI processing the world will do a lot of math and produce a coherent result (much like the unconscious brain will), but it has no seat of consciousness to allow it to "experience" rather than just manipulate the data it's receiving. We can artificially produce rainbows, but don't know if we can create a system that can experience the world in the same way we do.

This theory's pretty hand-wavy and probably easy to contradict, but as long as we don't understand most of the brain I'm happy to let what we don't know fill in the gaps. The seat of consciousness is a nice fixion [1] which allows for a non-deterministic universe, religion, emotion, etc. and I'm happy to be optimistic about it.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1621/