[T]here are significant problems of self-control created by the proliferation of simultaneously active specialists [in the mind], and one of the fundamental tasks performed by the activities of the [virtually serial] Joycean machine is to adjudicate disputes, smooth out transitions between regimes, and prevent untimely coups d'état by marshaling the "right" forces. Simple or overlearned tasks without serious competition can be routinely executed without the enlistment of extra forces, and hence unconsciously, but when a task is difficult or unpleasant, it requires "concentration," something "we" accomplish with the help of much self-admonition and various other mnemonic tricks, rehearsals, and other self-manipulations. Often we find it helps to talk out loud, a throwback to the crude but effective strategies of which our private thoughts are sleek descendants.
Such strategies of self-control permit us to govern our own perceptual processes in ways that open up new opportunities. As the psychologist Jeremy Wolfe points out, although our visual systems are natively designed to detect some sorts of things—the sorts that "pop out" when we "just look"—there are other sorts that we can identify only if we can look for them, deliberately, in a policy set up by an act of self-representation. A red spot among a slew of green spots will stick out like a sore thumb (actually, it will stick out like a ripe berry midst the leaves), but if your projects call for you to find a red spot in a crowd of spots of many different colors, you have to set yourself a task of serial search. And if your project is to find the red square piece of confetti amidst its multicolored and multishaped neighbors (or to answer the question "Where's Waldo?" in the popular puzzle pictures), the task of serial search can become a particularly engrossing, methodical project, calling on a high degree of self-control.
These techniques of representing things to ourselves permit us to be self-governors or executives in ways no other creature approaches. We can work out policies well in advance, thanks to our capacity for hypothetical thinking and scenario-spinning; we can stiffen our own resolve to engage in unpleasant or long-term projects by habits of self-reminding, and by rehearsing the expected benefits and costs of the policies we have adopted. And even more important, this practice of rehearsal creates a memory of the route by which we have arrived at where we are (what psychologists call episodic memory), so that we can explain to ourselves, when we find ourselves painted into the corner, just what errors we made. [...] [T]he development of these strategies permitted our ancestors to look farther into the future, and part of what gave them this enhanced power of anticipation was an enhanced power of recollection—being able to look farther back at their own recent operations to see where they made their mistakes. "Well, I mustn't do that again!" is the refrain of any creature that learns from experience, but we can learn to cast our thats back farther and more insightfully than any other creature, thanks to our habit of record-keeping—or more accurately, thanks to our habits of self-stimulation, which have among their many effects, the enhancement of recollection.
But such memory-loading is only one of the valuable effects of these habits. Just as important is the broadcasting effect, which creates an open forum of sorts, permitting any of the things one has learned to make a contribution to any current problem. Baars develops the claim that this mutual accessibility of contents provides the context without which events occurring "in consciousness" would not—could not—make sense to the subject. The contents that compose the surrounding context are not themselves always conscious—in fact, in general they are not accessible at all, in spite of being activated—but the connections between them and the contents that can show up in verbal reports are what secures what we might call their "consciously apprehended" meaning.
Dan Dennett on the virtual serialization of pandemonium in the Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness, and how it evolved in humans, in Consciousness Explained
