This question is of special interest, given the more general controversy among leading theories of consciousness25,26,27,28,29,30 regarding the role of frontal areas in generating conscious perception.
There are good reasons to believe that these internal active-perception processes (together with their external counterparts) play a key role in generating conscious perceptual experience (Marcel, 1983; Lamme & Roelfsema, 2000; Pascual-Leone & Walsh, 2001; Gilbert & Sigman, 2007; Gaillard et al., 2009; Meyer, 2011).
Rather, the posterior hot zone takes inputs from these areas and generates conscious sensory experiences -- and other conscious experiences as well.
Arguably, many behaving animals have the ability to distinguish between themselves and the environment, and to generate conscious experiences (of pain, for example) from sensory and motor activity.
Why all this integration shouldn't go on outside of conscious awareness, and why this area should generate conscious awareness of what is going on in it (or, alternatively, what it is doing) isn't clear.
The assemblies act like dimmer switches; activation by some particular external stimulus generates conscious experience of that stimulus; as the wave of activity passes, so the experience fades from our consciousness.
But people find it particularly perplexing to see how the physical goings-on really could explain and generate conscious experience". "I myself am inclined toward the view that it's not any more mysterious in the consciousness case than in any other," adds Bennett.
Again, we do not yet know how these structures generate the conscious experience of seeing or hearing, or seeing red vs. seeing green, or whatever.
The compelling concern to go in search, to discover, to add to one's store, or holding, or harem, is not generated by conscious planning.
These desires are generated by (conscious or unconscious) reasoning processes, in which one reasons one's way to the conclusion that if only it were the case that p that would make it more likely that q or would be a realization of q.
"At the highest station, the auditory cortex, just above your ears, these firing cells generate the conscious experience of music," explains William J. Cromie, Harvard University.
