I don't reject our subjective experience in the least. I only reject some of the ideas we have formed about it, free will, as opposed to flexible intelligence, being one of them. I don't reject compatibilist claims that we have worthwhile capacities that appear both externally and internally to be based on what we think of as free will. But I think "free will" suggests to most people very special uniquely human abilities to create and imagine without limits, to be a unique source of uncaused, wholly independent, newly minted ideas and impulses fabricated out of nothing by the pure energy of will. This is how it feels subjectively, and it is practically an invitation, if not a hard to avoid temptation, to leap to the conclusion of some type of dualism. I think this is an illusion, that our behaviors that seem "free willed" are really based on much more plodding and mundane capacities to iterate, experiment, evaluate, arrive at a result, learn, remember, vary, and repeat. We have physical stuff exquisitely structured that we can incrementally improve, but no divine sparks of magic insight as most people want to believe. I know compatibilists reject dualism, but I can't avoid the feeling that perpetuating the idea of free will just helps prop up this egotistical human presumption that there is a categorical difference between human and, say, primate or dolphin intelligence. I think the difference is merely a matter of degree, of extra brain capacity and advanced features in the human brain that extend but don't fundamentally alter the kind of intelligence that other mammals possess.

A purely materialistic account of consciousness can defeat the persistent idea of the soul, of mind as something that can live outside of the body, and therefore something that can survive the death of the body. This would effectively be scientific evidence against the afterlife. Of course there would be dead enders who believe in the face of all contrary evidence, but surely for large numbers it would bring realization that major premises of their belief were simply not true.

I think our subjective experience is valuable. I doubt it would have evolved if it weren't. It seems to me that the conscious mind has a kind of general purpose flexibility that more specialized unconscious functions lack. The unconscious excells in rapid complex tasks like auditory, visual, and much of language processing. The conscious mind excels in reusable abilities such as abstraction, recursion, symbolic associations and relations, stuff we use in language and reasoning and conceptualizing new variations on old themes.

I think the conscious mind is very important to learning, memorization, and evaluation. All of this is dependent upon unconscious capabilities, but the conscious seems to play a very important integrative function, and doing it as it does in a slow plodding way, reusing general purpose capacities, compared to say the rapid complex specialized processing of unconscious visual information, makes it more efficient in terms of the ratio of energy and brain volume to the resultant utility.

Another essential feature of consciousness seems to be the motivating power of emotions. We have some defensive mechanisms that are clearly unconscious, such as flinches, recoils, shivers, blinks, sneezes, etc. but these things are very specialized compared to the emotions. How would it work if fight or flight were purely unconscious like a flinch or sneeze? Would it trigger some pre-set evasive and or aggressive maneuvers? In what direction? Instead our reflex is the fear emotion and the adrenal responses that prime us for action and focus our attention, but what we do seems to be consciously arrived at. The conscious mind can iterate evaluative comparisons of visual input from various angles around us with remembered experiences of shelter, defensive weapons, etc. and make an intelligent choice rather than a purely reactive choice.

Automatic reflexes are powerful and instantly override everything else, but the actions are likely at times to be inappropriate to the situation. Thus more expensive, detailed actions spread out over greater space and time don't seem well suited to unconscious purely instinctive reflex. It seems iterative adjustment in adaptation to environmental changes is more appropriate, and it seems the general purpose reusable features of our conscious mind give us the ability to do this in a far greater variety of contexts and situations for a more variable set of purposes. Bird migrations may involve instinctive unconscious impulses, but a memorized unconscious flight path is probably dangerous for survival in many instances. It may be that a cycle of evaluation of conditions and adjustment of path, based on constantly changing visual input, requires some of the flexible associative indirect reusable ability of conscious reflection rather than the hard wired specialized features of unconscious reaction.

Human tool making is a far more varied set of activities than most animals engage in. If specially adapted brain circuits for unconscious performance of all these differing activities were needed our brains might have to grow to enormous proportions. Instead plastic memory and general purpose ability to associate and evaluate abstractly, substituting varying objects and contexts so we can reapply our remembered experiences and reuse our capacity for conscious thought in new ways, allows much more flexible behavior with less brain capacity used.

Following this idea of the general abilities of conscious thought, emotions take on a new meaning. Emotions seem like the uncoupling of unconscious reactions from physical action. Our unconscious mind detects from sensory input some danger or opportunity, but rather than triggering specific behaviors it signals an alert by generating an emotion or mixed emotions to focus our conscious attention with very high priority. This motivates and directs the general purpose evaluative mechanisms of subjective conscious thought, providing a very effective yet flexible interplay between the fast dedicated unconscious processing and the more context sensitive and environmentally appropriate adaptive ability of conscious reflection.

So it seems this combination of the rapid complex specialized features of the unconscious, paired with the general slow but reusable integrative features of the conscions mind may be able to provide powerful and flexibly adaptive behaviors in a more energy and brain capacity efficient way than a purely unconscious implementation.

Tool making could have been arrived at purely by natural selection, but the frequency of variations is that of successive generations. The rapidity of cycles of trial and error that the brain is able to engage in, plus the shared collective storage capabilities of cultural evolution, obviously provides huge advantages. The conscious mind's ability to symbolically substitute using abstract conceptual representations means it can try an action, look at the result, decide if it is good, then try it again slightly differently, I.e. with different motion, or grasping different objects, or grasping them with slightly different orientations. The conscious perception of success and progress with the associated emotional pleasure reinforces the memorization of particularly good or bad experiences. This pattern of try/learn/incrementally vary is a powerful repeatable cycle that can allow individuals to progress bit by bit daily or weekly rather than from lifetime to lifetime, and share horizontally between group members, or between groups. This all may rely on or be facilitated greatly by the partnership and interplay of unconscious and conscious features of the mind.