Pretty funny. Almost as funny as calling our subconsciousness UNconsciousness. In his excellent book, THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY, John Searle offered his thinking on this sort of reduction. He was not, shall we say, impressed with those who claim that things about which we think should spring, as if by magic, from a state in which we are functionally helpless and insensate. This would be roughly equivalent to considering humans to be as non-conscious as an earthworm. Or a rock. Or, funnier still, might we just as well say 'the collective physical processes in the brain' do not exist? I'm with Searle on this one. I just don't buy it. I have thought about these sorts of mental slight-of-hand maneuvers for several years. In coming to my own theory about it, I decided that it is every bit as possible that Freud was on the right track, though there was no way for him to prove it, nor is there any way for any of us to prove it, now---maybe even ever. I have looked at this from an 'origins' stance (and written an essay or two, as well). Primary consciousness and higher-order consciousness have been the two descriptors used by such researchers as Edelman and Tononi, et. al. In my writing, I have proposed another intermediate step which I dubbed primal consciousness---well beyond the primary, yet not as advanced as the higher-order.

In mentioning Freud and his work, I was giving credit to his notion of a subconscious in human beings. I believe it possible that such a state preceded both the pre-linguistic and linguistic consciousness that cognitive neuroscience has postulated of late. Again, this illustrates my notion about origins, which are necessary for almost anything and more so for anything alive which has undergone evolutionary change. We do not get something from nothing. At least, nothing as important as consciousness. I'll support Strawson's notion on THIS one. Those who deny consciousness ARE making a silly claim. It may not be the silliest ever made, but that is not the point. Finally, it should be clear that thinking (among even early human ancestors) preceded language and this is just how things were. Origins, again. Children think, before they ever utter MAMA or DADA. We have to start with something, not nothing...

Follow-up on deniers and other creativeness:
Consciousness is illusion. This has been kicked around quite a bit, 'from eternity to here', and back again. If it IS only, illusory, an awful lot of thinkers have been beating a dead horse a long time. On the other hand, if it is claimed by some, as seems the case, that all living things are conscious, the brain science folks are still on the right track. What they may ultimately find remains negotiable. As is the value of such finding(s).
I sorta like a newer hypothesis: consciousness is hallucination. Perhaps newer is not completely accurate. A whole lot of people were experimenting with hallucination in the 1960s & 70s. Some still are. They use a variety of compounds to induce the desired state. So if, in the new vein, (pun, incidental) the objective is to decide which sorts of compound our bodies manufacture to generate hallucinatory consciousness, then the trail has been re-blazed. Think of it this way: if that which we loosely call consciousness or self has always been around in some state of viability or another, then, by sheer reference, so has illusion and hallucination.
Ideation is part of epistemology---how we know what we know. On its' face, it is fairly straightforward. The hard part is wrapped tightly with fact-finding. Law is plagued by difficulty with all that. So much the more are difficulties with brain science, wherein we have a hard time determining what is real, and, uh, what is an illusion. Or, if you rather, hallucination. It is all interesting---some of it, at least plausible. Be like our host: question everything.