You are making a special distinction between stuff that is "part" of you, and stuff that is not "part" of you. In actuality there is no such clear distinction, there is only correlation in state, which is not binary but rather occurs on a spectrum.
Understand that I'm defining consciousness as the property of having awareness, not as the human mind. The human mind is what it is like to be a cerebral cortex with our given structure. Think of consciousness as being like a computer screen, and the mind as a picture displayed on that screen. That screen could display a very different image, but that wouldn't change what the screen itself is.
> You are making a special distinction between stuff that is "part" of you, and stuff that is not "part" of you
But this a crucial distinction when talking about consciousness, it's not arbitrary. Consciousness requires a subject to be conscious.
Splitting awareness from the human mind seems weird to me. It's not very useful to consider, say, my liver to be conscious. Even worse, there's no way to prove or disprove the assertion that it is conscious; it's even less falsifiable than talking about other people's consciousness!
The whole point of Jaynes' book is that consciousness is not required for most activities. He argues that not only are your body organs not conscious, but also that most activities you engage in every day aren't conscious either.
Decoupling awareness and its contents is a necessary prerequisite to a much more parsimonious philosophical viewpoint. Without taking that step, you're stuck with the idea that human awareness is somehow different in kind from the physical awareness that drives the evolution of everything else in the universe.
I don't understand what you mean by "the evolution of everything else in the universe", either. Consciousness isn't required for the evolution of living beings. Or do you mean something else?
When I say evolution here I mean a change in state, not Darwinian evolution.
I'm drawing a distinction between humans, who seem to have the ability to make choices, with the prevailing scientific world view, that everything is the result of mindless causal forces.
I suppose you could hold the epiphenominalist view that consciousness is a side effect with no causal agency, but then you have to explain why things that hinder survival/reproduction feel bad, and things that aid it feel good. If consciousness was truly an epiphenomenon there is no reason why there should be any concordance between survival value of events and their phenomenal character.
I think you have it backwards: if there is no reason for consciousness to have any concordance, then it can go either way. And there is evidence of lots of evolved traits that have indeed gone "either way". Or it could be that consciousness is not a blind side effect but actually provides survival value. Or maybe it is a side effect but it's harmless. There are lots of possibilities.
In any case, it seems this is a diversion from the main argument: if you aren't aware of a process, then it's not a conscious process on your part by definition.
Understand that I'm defining consciousness as the property of having awareness, not as the human mind. The human mind is what it is like to be a cerebral cortex with our given structure. Think of consciousness as being like a computer screen, and the mind as a picture displayed on that screen. That screen could display a very different image, but that wouldn't change what the screen itself is.