Part of what makes humans feel conscious, is we have two centers of consciousness. The main center is called the inner self. This center is similar to what animals have. It is the center of our natural instincts and human nature. The inner self is also the center of the unconscious mind.

The second center, which is relatively new in terms of evolution; 10,000 year ago, and is unique to humans, is called the ego and it is the center of the conscious mind. Self awareness and consciousness, as normally defined and experienced by humans, is connected to the ego being able to differentiate itself from the inner self, with the two centers setting a contrast using the parts of the brain stem involved in arousal.

As an analogy, say you were a good solider, who has been trained not to think on your own, but to blindly follow the orders from a commanding officer. This is like being one with instinct and the inner self. You go along, reacting to situations, without thinking. One day you get separated from your unit and find yourself in a unique situation where your training is no longer fully appropriate and your commanding officer is not around to give real time orders.

You try to blindly follow your training, like a good solider, but it was not fully designed for this situation. You still need to survive and return to your unit, so you need to improvise. However, since you have always been a good programed to react robot, this is very awkward. You find yourself shifting you mind between your programmed training and your own attempts to improvise, which are falling short due to lack of practice.

There are two states of arousal, occurring side by side, like two sine waves out of phase, but which overlap and separate cyclically as the time goes on. I think, therefore I am, is one of these two sine waves, with its arousal slightly out of phase with the inner self. The inner self is much faster since it uses the main frame parts of the brain; trained to react.

As an experiment, to investigate the inner self, have someone jump out from behind a door to scare you, when you are not prepared. Then may have to buy their time. When they finally catch you off guard, you may jump and may even scream like a little girl. This can be embarrassing because the inner self will act before the ego can react, so the ego may not have enough time to maintain its willful mask of being in control. This will create a phase difference in arousal between the two centers, from which you will feel more aroused and even conflict that you may prefer.

The traditional metaphysical explanation is close to this awareness in the sense it assumes two separate things; body and soul. These two separated things are analogous to inner self and ego, with the ego=soul, more unique, and the inner self=body more generic; human nature. The ancient people did not have the science to define consciousness in a material way, but they were able to self observe the phase difference and understand there were two things going on.