Self Comes to Mind

of the particular organism in which a mind is operating; and the state of mind includes knowledge to the effect that the said existence is situated , that there are objects and events surrounding it. Consciousness is a state of mind with a self process added to it.
    The conscious state of mind is experienced in the exclusive, first-person perspective of each of our organisms, never observable by anyone else. The experience is owned by each of our organisms and by no other. But even though the experience is exclusively private, we can still adopt a relatively “objective” view toward it. For example, I adopt such a view in the attempt to glean a neural basis for the self-as-object, the material me. An enriched material me is also capable of delivering knowledge to the mind. In other words, the self-as-object can also operate as knower.
    We can amplify this definition by saying that conscious mind states always have content (they are always about something) and that some of the contents tend to be perceived as integrated collections of parts (as, for example, when we both see and hear a person speaking and walking toward us); by saying that conscious states of mind reveal distinct qualitative properties relative to the different contents one comes to know (it is qualitatively different to see or listen, to touch or taste); and by saying that conscious states of mind contain an obligate aspect of feeling— they feel like something to us. Finally, our provisional definition must say that conscious states of mind are possible only when we are awake, although a partial exception to this definition applies to the paradoxical form of consciousness that occurs during sleep, in dreaming. In conclusion, in its standard form, consciousness is a state of mind that occurs when we are awake and in which there is private and personal knowledge of our own existence, situated relative to whatever its surround may be at a given moment. Of necessity, conscious states of mind handle knowledge based on different sensory material—bodily, visual, auditory, and so forth—and manifest varied qualitative properties for the different sensory streams. Conscious states of mind are felt .
    When I talk about consciousness, I am not referring simply to wakefulness, a common misuse that comes from the fact that when wakefulness is lost, consciousness is often lost as well. (I will address these issues in the pages ahead.) The definition also makes clear that the term consciousness does not refer simply to a plain mind process, without the self feature. Unfortunately, taking consciousness as mere mind is a common use of the term—a misuse, I think. People often refer to “something being in consciousness” to mean that something is “in mind” or that something has become a prominent content of mind, as in “the issue of global warming has finally penetrated the consciousness of Western nations”; a significant number of contemporary consciousness studies treat consciousness as mind. Nor does consciousness, as used in this book, stand for “self-consciousness” as meant in “John got more and more self-conscious as she continued to stare at him”; or “conscience,” a complex function that does require consciousness but goes well beyond it and pertains to moral responsibility. Finally, the definition does not refer to consciousness as in the colloquial sense of James’s “stream of consciousness.” The phrase is often meant to signify the plain contents of mind as they flow forward in time, like water in a riverbed, rather than the fact that such contents incorporate subtle or not-so-subtle aspects of subjectivity. References to consciousness in the context of Shakespeare’s soliloquies or Joyce’s often use this simpler view of consciousness. But the original authors were obviously exploring the phenomenon in its full sense, writing from the perspective of a character’s self, so much so that Harold Bloom has suggested that Shakespeare may have single-handedly introduced the phenomenon of consciousness into literature. (But see James Wood’s alternative and entirely plausible claim that consciousness did enter literature by way of the soliloquy but far earlier—in prayer, for example, and in Greek tragedy.) 1
Breaking Consciousness Apart
     
    Consciousness and wakefulness are not the same thing. Being awake is a prerequisite of being conscious. Whether one falls asleep naturally or is forced to sleep by anesthesia,