This is an important issue in psychopysiology which cannot be dismissed out of hand. Unfortunately it’s also a very complex issue. If you want to find out some more about the concept of implicit perception there are a number of review articles available. One such which is freely available can be found
here. It’s not a ten-minute read, but that’s just the way things are. It’s rather old, but it’s free and should be
sufficiently authoritative.
I thought about summarising some of the main findings, which are based on results from medical and psychological research over the past century (this is not a new concept). But that would just make this post way too long. The primary characteristic is that they are all quite gross findings, because those are the ones that have stood up to repeated enquiry. But they do certainly exist. There definitely are elements of memory and perception that can function without awareness of that function.
But that doesn’t mean that we can jump to unwarranted conclusions about the rest of the perceptual system. It doesn’t mean we can
assume such elements exist in other forms. The presence of implicit perception needs to be robustly demonstrated if we’re to use it to explain certain auditory phenomena. This is especially true as there are many other explanations for many of these phenomena. And we should never dismiss the extent of neural plasticity, especially in situations involving directed training.
This all boils down to what science is really all about: “Nice idea, now go and prove it.”