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timtyler comments on Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model - Less Wrong
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Your consciousness contains the things you need to be able to reflect on in order to function properly. That seems like a much more basic way of delineating the conscious mind than the proposed signalling theory.
Yes: consciousness sometimes excludes things that it is undesirable to signal - but surely that is more of a footnote to the theory than its main feature. Quite a bit of that work is actually done by selective forgetting - which is a feature with better targeting capabilities than the filters of consciousness.
If you want the answer to involve signalling, then the ego seems like a more suitable thing to examine.
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.