Another way to think about it is that your consciousness is like an operating system of a computer. It handles a lot of things, most things the user would be aware of, but there's a lot more computation going on than just in the operating system.

For instance, there is a certain kind of blindness where the eyes are functional, but the consciousness sees black. When told to look at pictures of people, subjects were able to guess how trustworthy someone appeared to like 70% accuracy, iirc, implying that some of the brain was still able to process the image, even if the conscious mind didn't know why.