I have indeed seen these proto-thoughts. I’m not going to mention how I did this, but you can imagine.
The line between conscious and unconscious is a fuzzy one, and is merely a matter of “speed.” What is now just an ultra-fast proto-thought was at one point in your development a slower, conscious thought. A proto-thought is just one that is had so fast that you don’t notice it (notice=hold it in memory long enough to note it consciously). If you slow down the processing of your conscious short-term memory buffer, its scope just burrows deeper into what is normally below conscious awareness. You remember less about what was happening a few moments ago (short-term memory loss), but the trade-off is that you can see deeper into the level of proto-thoughts (=fast thoughts). Sound like the effects of any common item?
See my responses to: https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/simultaneous-actions/17820
Switching gears, the other thing you are talking about is animism, which - interestingly enough - is the only rational (=imaginable, conceivable) alternative to physicalism. That is to say, there are two ways in which you can make sense of the world around you, two ways you can explain the phenomena that obtain in your 5 senses:
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By viewing those phenomena as being the result of mechanistic interactions among physical objects
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By viewing those phenomena as being the result of intentional action by acting entities
If we view all natural phenomena by lens #2, we have animism. And just for completeness/clarity, I’ll mention that if we view the actions of other humans through lens #1, we have mechanistic determinism (not sure if that’s the usual term). If we view natural phenomena through lens #1, we have the explanatory scientific method as espoused by Gaede, et al. If we view the actions of other humans through lens #2, we have praxeology.
The only problem is, animism doesn’t seem that useful for physical science…unless of course we find that there is a sort of “physical praxeology” that can be utilized to make theories that are actually useful.
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A third thing you’re touching on is the idea of natural selection in matter. This makes a lot of sense if the universe is as LaFreniere imagines: http://glafreniere.com/matter.htm The wave patterns that are stable prevail over those that don’t, akin to the natural selection of stable and unstable patterns in Conway’s game of life.