This whole "identifying with consciousness" business is totally bizarre to me. I hate to come on with the self-help - but: consciousness is tiny! You are so much more than that! Please repeat to yourself 1,000 times - "I am not my conscious mind!" The idea that you are your consciousness is an illusion created by your ego - which thinks it is the most wonderful thing in the world - that everything revolves around it - and that it is you. If you get some perspective, you should be able to see what utter nonsense that is.

Sounds like an outside the box box. So I have a job interview tomorrow morning and my conscious mind is telling me to go to sleep early, but my unconscious keeps me up worrying and watching TV until midnight. Should I respect the secret wisdom of the unconscious mind that my deluded ego-self is keeping me from understanding, or should I shut up and figure out some way to get to sleep?

I like Buddhism. I meditate and I'm very interested in exploring the depths of my unconscious mind and possibly at some point dissolving my ego and achieving full awareness, whatever the heck that means. But the "unconscious" referred to in the original post is what's telling the drunkard to get another shot of whiskey. I don't think the Buddha would approve of that particular manifestation of it any more than anyone else, and all I'm saying is that this drunkard is justified in being against this desire, rather than thinking that since it's their unconscious mind they have to accept it.

The bit of the mind that switches attention around might itself be relatively small - and gains the illusion of size by being able to illuminate many areas of the mind - by damping down perceptions from everywhere else.

And the PCT hypothesis for why this is so (predating the Society of Mind by a decade or so), is that consciousness is effectively the debugger or test rig for the rest of the brain: a tool whose job is the tuning, adjustment, and extension of the brain's unconscious control systems. The conscious mind is heavily engaged in any sort of skill acquisition, "noticing" what perceptions are associated with success or failure, and this noticing process is key to wiring up new control circuits.

From this perspective, consciousness is effectively an on-call maintenance person, a tech support rep for the unconscious. Which provides a good evolutionary reason for "higher" animals to have higher degrees of consciousness; the more flexible the creature, the more advanced the tech support required. ;-)

That humans have decided to rebel and take over the company instead of functioning in a strictly support capacity is a separate issue.

And when the revolution isn't going so well, we call it "akrasia".

So the key to a smooth takeover is realizing that if the unconscious machinery isn't working well, then you will suffer right along with your unconscious. You need a win-win solution, and the unconscious is pretty easily satisfied, being just a big dumb array of thermostats and all.

An array which -- being that you're its tech support rep -- you can actually rewire. In fact, most of what's in there, you consciously put there at some point, or at least didn't object to.

But if you treat it like it's an independent mind -- which it isn't -- and an enemy (which it also isn't) whose demands should be disregarded, then you're never even going to perceive what is actually going on in there, and therefore won't be able to tell how to change any of it. And you'll just keep fighting, instead of debugging.

Not really a good use of your time, IMO.