Just having fun and speculating a lot here... IIRC, there was a study that found that when humans are presented with a sufficiently short-lived stimulus, there

Just having fun and speculating a lot here... IIRC, there was a study that found that when humans are presented with a sufficiently short-lived stimulus, there is correlated localized activity in the brain (ie, the visual processing areas for a sight) but not globalized activity - and the subject is unaware of the stimuli. But when the stimuli is presented for long enough, there is globalized activity - and the person is aware. It looks like 'becoming aware of a thing' has a lot to do with non-local inference that could involve other unrelated subsystems (which is the main idea in Baar's Global workspace theory, IIUC). > I've never had an actual conversation with a corporation... So if you've talked with a support person, maybe you have? If it was a simple issue, the corporation maybe wouldn't be 'aware' (though it could later remember it in the form of chat logs or support tickets). But if it was a difficult issue? Maybe you got tech support? Maybe your issue found it's way into some team's backlog? Maybe it even changed a product roadmap. Maybe we talk to corporations all the time - it's just weird fitting the interaction into our mental models of 'conversation'.