As a little warm up to my possible TPB guest post, I'm going to try wading into this thread... after work (which essentially means I'm dead tired - but I have my laptop back and typing is pleasing).
So the crux
Intentional concepts such as belief, desire, good, perception, volition, action–all the furniture of conscious life–are simply ropes and trees and snakes. Misapprehensions. According to BBT, there are literally no such things.
But I'm still uncertain: what, then, is the Elephant? What is the whole that we cannot comprehend?
'The Elephant' is everything your brain is doing that you don't experience "directly." Science is hard-pressed to coherently express how much information the brain processes and how it does so (mostly a mixture of chemical and electrical activity, maxing out the basic heat potentials of an organ like the brain by dispersing its energy output). But what "you" or "I" directly experience is a fraction of what's going on in the brain at any given time (though, I might argue that we can train ourselves to experience more of that going's on).
As a segue, one of my favorite introductions to the brain was the Default Mode Network (because computer metaphors won't die, despite the brain defeating analogy by every historical comparison ever) and the Connectome.
Bakker's picked the thalamocortical because it is a structure at the crux between many "higher cognitive functions" neural-correlates of consciousness we might associate with "the self" in this discussion and unconscious, non-conscious, mammalian, reptilian, functions of the brain stem, cerebellum, etc.
Again, we can argue that you can work to experience more. But as a commonality, we aren't able to articulate the majority of our brain's functional life because it just doesn't exist to "us." One point that really changed my outlook on all of this was the variety of brain dysfunction and degeneration. Blindsight, prosopagnosia, akinetopsia, etc, etc, ad nauseam. Dysfunction and degeneration can be so, so selective and one need only read
My Stroke of Insight to have a clear example of the old adage "few are lucky enough to diagnose themselves." And yet in almost every case, people cannot articulate their own absences. For instance, it was a common demonstration in the psychology textbooks I read to showcase our blindspot, where our visual field actually has an absence where the retinal nerves exit the eye.
This notion that "self" is illusory and that perception/consciousness can be altered through neurological experiment is hardly breaking news?
Haven`t people all over the world figured that out through the use of psychedelics and deep meditation/yoga? Another example is the experience called "satori" in zen buddhism.
Some people have. Supposing that a majority of people adopt this perspective is foolish, though. In many cases, many of those realizations are attributed to "the mind," instead of "the brain," etc. As you wrote, our articulations dominate every domain.
Lol - now that I've read the thread, I see that you all haven't taken this too far.
So to finish up for the moment, though I feel this has been good warmup for tomorrow, if only as a short introduction, our experience of what we call consciousness is truncated, no matter how we cut that discussion. Whether or not one can truly maximize their experience of the brain's function is another guess, entirely.