The Mystery of the Chiming Bell
We've all had this experience: The clock tower starts chiming. At first, you're paying no attention, but about three or four chimes in, you suddenly notice. In memory, you can count back those first few chimes.
Here's the question: Did you have auditory experience of those chimes before you started thinking about them? Were they part of your stream of conscious experience, part of your phenomenology, part of "what it was like to be you", during those first few inattentive seconds? Or, until you started attending to the matter, were the chimes no part at all of your conscious experience, not even a secondary and peripheral part? Were they, that is, only part of an at-the-time nonconscious but after-the-fact recoverable "sensory store"?
Similarly: Suppose you suddenly notice, for the first time, that you have a mild headache. Was the pain a small, background part of your stream of experience before you first noticed it? Or did you not really experience the pain until you actually directed attention to the state of your head? Is having an enduring pain a matter of constantly experiencing painfulness, in the background or foreground depending on your state of attention; or is it more a matter of having occasional spurts of felt pain, arising from an enduring nonconscious disposition for such spurts to shoot annoyingly and against your will into consciousness?
Philosophers, psychologists, and ordinary folks seem to have different opinions about these questions. One group may be wrong and the other right; or everyone may be right about their own experiences, wrong to the extent they generalize to others. Is there a good way to determine where the truth lies? I'm inclined to think not -- at least not in the short term. Introspection can only reveal consciousness as attended at the moment, not whatever experience there is, or is not, without attention. Immediate memory is corrupted both by our typical quick forgetting of things outside attention and the potential confusion of actual experiences with the recovery, from the sensory store, of previously unexperienced traces (if such a thing is possible; and we can't assume it's not possible without begging the question). Third-person methods like brain imaging require, to be interpretable as revealing facts about consciousness, a prior commitment to the very issue at hand and thus are inescapably circular.
You may or you may not think you experienced that chiming bell before you attended to it. I can't see, though, how you could have any secure ground for that opinion.