'Perhaps the conscious experience of thinking is merely a byproduct of the computing going on at sub-conscious level. A boiling pot of water produces noise, but it doesn't mean it's the noise that is cooking the egg. Thought could be a necessary byproduct of neural computation that doesn't itself produce the solution. If you think about thinking, doesn't there seem to be something involuntary about it?'

I see what you are saying. I think there is probably some truth to it actually, but I don't think the conscious and subconscious can be easily divided, and I doubt that one is simply representative of the other. Interestingly, in patients that have had their corpus callosum cut (the white matter connecting the two hemispheres), the person's actions can betray their conscious mind. I remember reading that although a patient might consciously select one shirt to wear, their arm might grab another. I think more likely than the conscious simply being a reflection of the subconscious, it is probably just another type of processing that is one part of the complete system. I imagine that decisions are the result of competing processes, of which conscious thought is but one part.