The target article sought to question the common belief that our decisions are often biased by unconscious influences. While many commentators offer additional support for this perspective, others question our theoretical assumptions, empirical evaluations, and methodological criteria. We rebut in particular the starting assumption that all decision making is unconscious, and that the onus should be on researchers to prove conscious influences. Further evidence is evaluated in relation to the core topics we reviewed (multiple-cue judgment, deliberation without attention, and decisions under uncertainty), as well as priming effects. We reiterate a key conclusion from the target article, namely, that it now seems to be generally accepted that awareness should be operationally defined as reportable knowledge, and that such knowledge can only be evaluated by careful and thorough probing. We call for future research to pay heed to the different ways in which awareness can intervene in decision making (as identified in our lens model analysis) and to employ suitable methodology in the assessment of awareness, including the requirements that awareness assessment must be reliable, relevant, immediate, and sensitive.

With respect to the Distancing-Embracing model, we discuss whether experts with well-developed and highly accessible schemata that lend themselves to distancing have initial affective reactions similar to those of novices, who lack access to well-developed distancing mechanisms, and whether differences between experts' and novices' responses are apparent only after distancing mechanisms have had a chance to do their work. We revisit findings from Leder et al. (2014) and discuss the role of mixed emotions and fluency.

In Gray's conjecture, mismatches in the subicular comparator (needing problem resolution) and matches (during appetitive approach) have equal prominence in consciousness. In rival cognitive views novelty and difficulty (i.e., information-processing mismatches) especially elicit more conscious modes of cognition and higher levels of self-regulation. The mismatch between Gray's conjecture and these views is discussed.

Pulvermüller's attempt to link language with brain activity appears to depend on the assumption that words have context-independent meanings. An examination of everyday talk contradicts this assumption. The meaning that speakers convey depends not only on word content, but also, and importantly, on the location of a “word” in an ongoing sequence of turns in talk.

Seeking to unlock the secrets of consciousness, neuroscientists have been studying neural correlates of sensory awareness, such as meaningless randomly moving dots. But in the natural world of species' survival, “raw feelings” mediate conscious adaptive responses. Merker connects the brainstem with vigilance, orientating, and emotional consciousness. However, depending on the brain's phylogenetic level, raw feeling takes particular forms.

Barsalou's elision of the personal and sub-personal levels tends to conceal the fact that he is, at best, providing the “specs” but not yet a model for his hypothesized perceptual symbols.

Can consciousness be understood through an association with voluntary skeletomotor action selection? Although flexible and integrated action selection is a plausible function for consciousness, a narrow focus on skeletomotor control neglects the contributions to conscious selfhood and subjectivity that rest on interoception and autonomic regulation (internal “action”). I consider these issues from the perspective of predictive processing.