Ya absolutely, and thus my preference for "lenses" or "abstractions" of thoughts. I think people are expressing something real and felt when they talk about the

Ya absolutely, and thus my preference for "lenses" or "abstractions" of thoughts. I think people are expressing something real and felt when they talk about their "lizard brain" doing something independent of their "human brain". I'm quibbling with the authors rejection of Descartes. "I observe therefore I am" and "I think therefore I am" are isomorphic, as an unthinking observer, a truly passive mechanism, would be unable to express or even meaningfully experience the former. A rock is a passive observer, shaped by its environment purely experientially without reflection or commentary. A human mind and consciousness, whatever set of forms you might want to fit it in (dualism, materialism, whatever the hell Chalmers is doing), is not passive, it is reflective. Now, the mechanisms by which qualia are passed to that reflective mind are passive or at least involuntary, and these give rise to certain involuntary thoughts, experiential thoughts. I cannot refuse the thought of the form "the air is hot", because I cannot refuse the experience of being hot. For that I'm just along for the ride. But when I reflect on how I nickelpro will logically place my self-satisfaction due to the heat, that's not a passive act. And all of these reflective and experiential thoughts are mixed up in the soup of my single consciousness, not strictly delineated within my narrative.