There's an interesting approach to "consciousness", as what you are aware of, consciously. i.e. attention management. Animals are conscious of their environment in this way. But because humans also have a lot of models going on internally, the mechanism adapts to that (perhaps higher mammals too; I don't recall). This fits nicely with your experience and the submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373806

I wonder if our "conscious reasoning" is really just attending to a column that does that? Certainly, formal reasoning is a skill that is learnt and practiced - perhaps not so different from a manual skill. We can also suppose pattern-matching on this, to get intuition and hunches. All old ideas, but perhaps neuroanatomy is advancing sufficiently to test them?

Also: Minsky's Society of Mind