However, I think the article is simply suggesting to invert this assumption about physical reality. It proposes that for something to be "out there", you first need an "in here" (rather than afterwards), i.e. an experiencing of forms. This would be consciousness. At this point we are not even talking about decision making, thinking, memory, intellectual pursuits... Just subjective experience. So everything you're taking into the discussion regarding how thinking and decision making and memory happens is really a bridge further; not immediately relevant to the point the author is making.
I understand if this line of reasoning feels uncomfortable. You were literally pleading people to think that this is wrong. I think that is a mistake. There is value in challenging your assumptions, even if only philosophical with ethical/moral ramifications.
Since a person can tell what they experience and what they do not, the distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing must have a base in physical reality (brain activity). With sufficiently advanced technology, one could analyze the brain processes and see which processes are associated with the reported conscious experience.
The fact that not all brain activity is associated with conscious experience in no way implies that conscious experience does not exist.
Conscience is not present during the physical exercise. Upon completion, when conscience describes it, it injects itself into it. This is the trick.
And how exactly does that back calculation happen?
You'd have to give definitions of consciousness that don't include human contact, don't include language, symbols, any human other than yourself at all, or any thoughts at all not related to short-term survival, don't involve realizing you (as a human) are obviously not a wolf, ...
It also means that there is a period where you can be taught consciousness, and clearly if it doesn't happen before 7 years of age, you will never learn it.
It does seem clear that language assists consciousness in most people – e.g. most people report experiencing an internal narrative. But some people don’t. And even if everyone did, I don’t think that would be strong enough evidence to conclude that language is required for consciousness.
1) (extreme) autistic person that doesn't speak, but can, and arguably thinks too abstract, rather than not enough : yes, conscious. Probably more conscious in some sense than "normal" people, whose consciousness is more a group thing, or at least less independent.
(also: not speaking is a pretty extreme form of autism, certainly not something you'd see in your average school)
2) person that grew up without ever having any reason to learn symbolic or abstract thinking ? No, not conscious
But it's going to be a sliding scale thing. By some measures a cat and a dog are conscious because, well, because they are certainly capable of making humans think they are suffering (and therefore they both think and feel, which is where consciousness definitions are going on now. Fish, for instance, are not). This seems to me a really bad way to define it but it's certainly widely used.
It's equally clear that most of what we associate with consciousness, such as thinking, awareness of the body and the moment and time and decision making and ... doesn't exist either. Because time and time again studies prove that when a decision is made (this is well studied in traffic for instance) there are no conscious reasons. Reasons only happen afterwards.
Is it therefore such a stretch to say that consciousness simply doesn't exist until long after the fact, and it is only once we ask one of these bags of mostly water to explain themselves (or ... well when we ask them something) that any trace of consciousness, at least the way humans understand it, is actually forthcoming ?
Consciousness is a trick. A learned trick. Human minds are not conscious and it is most definitely not a certainty that they, even when born fully formed and healthy that they will become conscious (read the reports on children raised by animals. They are old, sometimes 20 years old and they most definitely aren't conscious, not even on the level that a primate is conscious. The 12 year old boy they found in the wild in France never learned to speak only to articulate 2 words).
This is weird, because this is not most humans experience. Everyone around them always had consciousness. But let's compare. Everybody who has kids realizes that memory, firstly, isn't actually memory. We are very much not storing events when they happen in our brain. We learn a trick, because our parents keep referring to our past and "what we've done". We learn to calculate back from our current state of mind to what happened before.
That and of course philosophers have a millennium or 3 of history of ... philosophers getting consciousness wrong. Consciousness has been accepted in history to be being religious, to being able to rhyme, to composing music, to being able to talk and explain ourselves, to being able to love, to convince a professor (via chat) that you are conscious, to solve problems (all kinds), to walk around, to play chess, to ... all of these are now of course considered wrong. Why ? Mostly because things that definitely aren't conscious, from little dumb tricks, even mechanical contraptions in some cases, to rule based engines, to deep learning and now reinforcement learning algorithms can do this.
So can we please just conclude that whatever this article claims is ... wrong ? Just wrong. Nothing of value, other than perhaps interest a few people for stories with enough alcohol present. The current consensus seems to be that more details will be forthcoming the first time a reinforcement learning algorithm gets far enough to explain it's actions. So you want to know more ? Start there.