Free will redux

The more I think about it, the more I don't like the way the previous argument is framed. One problem is that consciousness is not explicitly defined, and it's implicit that consciousness should be the `decision maker.' However, I feel this is wrong. When I meditate, thoughts just bubble up. I didn't explicitly cause them to happen. They happen spontaneously, and often I will have followed a long train of associations before I'm even aware of doing so. So I strongly feel that the origination of conceptual thought is not conscious. Similarly, I've been in many situations where I feel like a decision was made at the unconscious level before I became consciously aware of it. I think one should really refer to three distinct agents or processes in the brain:

1) the thought generator
2) the decision maker
3) the awareness

This third one seems to be the really special one. But anyway, the workings of the thought generator and the decision maker are not totally accessible to the awareness. Thus it seems that if free will operates, it operates at a level inaccessible to our awareness, at least in normal conscious states. The awareness perhaps can be thought of as a highly flexible tool that we evolved which can help focus our data intake which then gets fed into the subconscious thought generator and decision maker. But it feels like it's more than that. Like our awareness almost has an independent existence which we identify with our sense of self. That subjective experience is rather mysterious. In any event, the awareness can be focused on many things, and during meditation, we turn it back on the mind itself and try to uncover more of the normallt unconscious processes. I'm not an experienced meditator (I've only been meditating regularly for about a year), but my conjecture is that through meditation and diligent training of the awareness, one is able to reach the nonconceptual underlying our usual consciousness. Perhaps this means that through meditation we get to a place where we really have free will, not an unconscious decision process which the awareness perceives as free will, unless it looks deeply enough.

Getting back to Searle's argument, this leaves the question of why the "mysterious" subjective experience of the awareness has evolved. In this case, the argument hangs on whether the awareness agent in the brain could have evolved without there being personal subjective experience. If so, then one needs an explanation for why personal subjective experience evolved. If it is a natural byproduct of the awareness agent (which I visualize like a lamp or a flashlight that shines in different directions), then no further explanation is needed. But now Searle's argument seems to lead in a different direction. If the personal subjective experience part of awareness evolved separately, what evolutionary role does it play? As I have argued above, actual decisions (free or not) are normally outside the purview of our awareness, so it seems to play no role. Perhaps, and I say this hesitantly, this is a sign that there is something deeper about our awareness which is outside the standard scientific conception. In Buddhism, we believe that our mindstreams give rise to our bodies and to the world around us through the arising of afflicted emotions and concepts, and our karma. The mindstream is fundamental, the world around us more like a dream or an illusion. The above analysis is consistent with this, I think. It still requires investigation, the main question being can an awareness agent, which serves to select sensory input to feed to the unconscious decision maker, evolve in an animal brain without giving rise to personal subjective experience?