What does that even mean?
I believe I've seen an article touching this topic here, long before GPT. Will link if I find it
One way to see this is that sentience and language processing are just two aspects available to us in consciousness.
We are also not identical to our thoughts or feelings, but most people never pause to contemplate this.
I suspect the autopilot you describe is really closer to our default state, but it’s easier to notice when in a calm state and the “me-ness” of actions/thoughts doesn’t feel so strong.
The only description I've ever seen of consciousness that makes any sense is that it's a kind of condition monitoring system for our minds, a cross-check evolved to catch some of the cognitive mistakes that the main machinery of our minds tend to make from time to time. And because our whole brain is linked into this system, including itself, we get that infinite regress of omphaloskepsis that we call "consciousness."
I don't do a lot of metacognition (thinking about my thinking) while I'm in a flow state, which maybe was your point. But I can think about my prior flow state thinking after the fact, and I'm aware of how much my mind was working, and what that felt like.
In other words, consciousness is an emergent phenomena that happens in a system of sending messages when eventually an agent starts sending messages to itself. "you" are the voices in your head not attributed to anyone else.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who...