1
I question whether it is completely accurate to think of the philosophical meaning of consciousness as being switched-on or switched-off.
It may be that, once consciousness is switched-on, it is then found in degrees in animals we deem conscious. In which case, consciousness is more like a switched-on rheostat, rather than a simple on–off switch. Christian de Quincey (2006) gives a list of what would be considered the marks of consciousness, including ‘experience, subjectivity, sentience, feeling, or mentality of any kind’. He also seems to conflate awareness with experience when speaking about the light of consciousness being on. In keeping with de Quincey’s desire to get clear about the meaning of consciousness, I will put forward an idea of consciousness as the experience of oneself as a being subject to past, present, and future events, and contrast this idea with a state of awareness. De Quincey claims that ‘any entity that is a subject — that feels its own being — possesses consciousness’. I want to add to this meaning of consciousness by noting the subject’s sense of temporality, so as to further qualify the meaning of consciousness and show how awareness is distinct from consciousness.
Further, for me, the psychological dimension is also an ontological category that includes all of what de Quincey means by consciousness, with the qualification that awareness , cognition , sentience , perception , and feeling are psychological states, though not states of consciousness. Nonetheless, these psychological states may be
Correspondence: Robert Arp — Southwest Minnesota State University
Email: Arpr@southwestmsu.edu
[1] See Christian de Quincey (2006), ‘Switched-on consciousness: Clarifying what it means’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies , 13 (4), pp. 7–12.
Journal of Consciousness Studies , 14 , No. 3, 2007, pp. 101–106

102 R. ARP accompanied by consciousness. Another way to say this is that entities with consciousness also have psychological awareness, cognition, sentience, perception, and feeling (like humans and, possibly, primates); however, entities with psychological awareness, cognition, sentience, perception, and feeling need not be conscious (like animals such as worms, fish, and cats). Also, it is probably the case that awareness comprises various states and degrees such that it, too, should be thought of more like a switched-on rheostat, rather than an on–off switch. The end result of my investigation will be to amend de
Quincey’s notions of consciousness by drawing an important distinction between non-conscious awareness and conscious experience, as well as to show that de Quincey is partly correct about consciousness: consciousness is ‘on’ in certain animals; but it also seems to come in degrees when we consider the developing mind of a human being and different species of conscious animals.
My wife the first-grade teacher, our two-year old daughter, our cat, our fish, and mealworms for the fish live in the Arp household (the mealworms live in a container in the fridge awaiting their fate as a meal for the fish). Common sense tells me that there is a hierarchy of mental capacities ranging from the more fully conscious to the less fully conscious — or not conscious at all — when I move from my wife to the worm. In his paper, because ‘sentience, awareness, subjectivity, and experience’ are all marks of the philosophical meaning of consciousness, de Quincey intimates that worms have the light of consciousness turned on just like my wife, although not to the same psychological degree. This strikes me as inaccurate for two reasons. First, using some of de Quincey’s own terminology, we can distinguish non-conscious awareness from conscious experience in order to show that worms might be aware, but not conscious. Second, even if the worm were conscious in the philosophical sense — along with my cat, daughter, and wife — it would seem that, again, in the philosophical sense, there are degrees of consciousness from the less conscious (worm, cat), to the more conscious (my daughter), to the most conscious (my wife).
As I understand the meaning of the term, awareness refers to the processing that occurs as a result of the interaction of an animal’s nervous system (including sensory apparatuses) and its environment, whereby this processing results in a basic ability of the animal to react to stimuli from the environment (cf. Kandell et al ., 2000; Bear et al .,
2001; Brefczynski and DeYoe, 1999; Farah, 1997). Here, awareness is associated with terms like sentience , perception , feeling , and cognition . On the other hand, consciousness — again, as I am understanding the term — results from the complex interaction of the multimodal

CONSCIOUSNESS AND AWARENESS 103 association areas of, at least, the parietotemporal and limbic cortices in an animal’s brain, and refers to the capacity to experience oneself as a being subject to the past, present, and future, including the reflection on oneself as a being that is aware of its surrounding environment (cf.
Roth, 2000; Lycan, 1995; Humphrey, 1998). I say capacity because a conscious being need not be engaged in such an experience at all moments of its life. Here, consciousness is associated with terms like experience , subjectivity , and reflection on awareness . Further — and this is the important point that connects up with my analogy of consciousness acting as a rheostat — the extent that a being can incorporate recognition of the self as seen in light of the past, present, and future precisely is the extent to which a being can be considered more partially or more fully conscious. The more an animal is able to experience the self in complex relationships with other selves and objects concerning past, present, and future events, situations, and scenarios, the more conscious the animal is.
Awareness need not be accompanied by consciousness. So worms may be aware, but they are not conscious; whereas my wife is both aware and conscious. I think that there is something to the idea of an animal having consciousness switched-on, so to speak, but a worm does not seem to have a conscious switch activated. Rather, it has an awareness switch activated. Because they have nervous systems which are functioning normally, our fish, cat, and daughter also are aware. Further, it seems to me that, depending upon the number of sensory apparatuses it has as well as the sophistication of its neurobiology, an entity will be more or less aware, perceiving, and/or cognizant. Worms appear to be less aware than cats and, so, the rheostat might be a better descriptive analogy to use for the psychology of these animals, rather than the on-off analogy.
Given my meaning of consciousness, it would seem that the worms, fish, and cat living in the Arp household are aware, but not conscious.
But it would also seem that my two-year old daughter is aware, but not conscious. I would say that she is not fully conscious, but she has a limited form of consciousness at her stage of human development. In other words, her switch is on, but the light is very dim. I think that she has a limited form of consciousness because she seems to be able to make present connections between past events and future events as they affect her life. When certain words are mentioned like Christina , playground , and grandmommy , she responds with an apparent knowledge of her self as having had an experience with that word: with
Christina, she says friend and play probably because she has played with or wants to play with her friend, Christina; with playground, she

104 R. ARP says slide and outside probably because she recalls playing outside on the slide, or she wants to play outside on the playground; and with grandmommy, she says dog and house probably because her grandparents have dogs, and we have gone to visit them at their much bigger house. The association seems to indicate some knowledge of her self as either having had an experience with what the word represents, or as anticipating having an experience with what the word represents.
So, I would say she has a very limited, or ‘dim,’ sense of her self as a subject in these temporal relationships.
Similar reactions concerning a kind of self-experience can be witnessed in studies performed on chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans where these animals seem to associate themselves with a past event, anticipate events, cheat one another, and fashion tools for future use
(cf. Byrne, 1995; 2001; Whiten et al ., 1996; Griffin, 1992; Parker,
1996). Further, I think there is a continuum of less and more conscious beings depending upon the extent to which that being is able to experience the self in complex relationships with other selves and objects concerning past, present, and future events, situations, and scenarios.
So, the college students I teach likely are more conscious than my daughter, but are not as conscious as, say, the Dalai Lama or a
Maslowian self-actualized person. Of course, de Quincey is correct to note that ‘only consciousness can study consciousness’, so any probable inferences about awareness or consciousness we draw from my daughter’s behaviours or the behaviours of other primates — or any animal, for that matter — are just that: probable inferences!
It is important to note that what I mean by a psychological state entails any mental activity resulting from a basic central/peripheral nervous system ranging from awareness to full conscious experience.
So, like de Quincey, I am willing to admit that worms, along with cats, primates, humans, and many other species of animals, have varying psychological states of awareness. De Quincey, however, inappropriately conflates awareness and consciousness when giving his psychological meaning of consciousness. For him, all entities having awareness also have consciousness, and vice versa. More accurately, the psychological dimension should be viewed more like a genus that includes awareness and consciousness as two distinct species, much like the genus mammal includes cats and humans as distinct species.
Again, worms, cats, primates, my daughter, and my wife all have awareness in varying degrees of psychological states; but my daughter, primates, and my wife have both awareness and consciousness in varying degrees of psychological states.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND AWARENESS 105
Having said all of this, it may be helpful to summarize, in chart form, a comparison of de Quincey’s philosophical and psychological categorizations with mine, which the reader will find below.
DE QUINCEY’S CATEGORIZATION
I. Philosophical/Ontological Dimension of Consciousness
— either OFF or ON
Qualities Include: sentience, awareness, feeling, subjectivity, experience
Non-Conscious Entities (consciousness switched-off) Include: tables, rocks, chairs
Conscious Entities (consciousness switched-on) Include: worms, the Dalai Lama, George W. (my fish, cat, and daughter too)
II. Psychological Dimension of Consciousness
— on a DIMMER SWITCH
Qualities Include: any mental activity whatsoever ranging from psychological sleep to full spiritual awakening
ARP’S CATEGORIZATION
I. Philosophical/Ontological Dimension of Awareness as One Kind of
Psychological State: either OFF (non-awareness), or ON and DIM to
BRIGHT (various degrees of awareness)
(A) Non-Awareness Entails: cognition, perception, sentience, and/or feeling in the OFF position
Examples of Non-Aware Entities Include: tables, rocks, chairs
(B) Awareness Entails: cognition, perception, sentience, and/or feeling in the ON and
DIM to BRIGHT positions
Examples of Aware Entities Include:
DIM > worms, fish, cats, two-year old humans, primates, humans of all ages < BRIGHT
II. Philosophical/Ontological Dimension of Consciousness as Another Kind of Psychological State: either OFF (non-conscious), or ON and DIM to
BRIGHT (various degrees of consciousness)
(A) Limited Conscious Awareness Entails:
Experience of Subject’s Temporality ON and DIM
Examples Include: my two-year old daughter and primates

106 R. ARP
(B) Fuller Conscious Awareness Entails:
Experience of Subject’s Temporality ON and BRIGHTER
Examples Include: normal seven-year olds
(C) Still Fuller Conscious Awareness Entails:
Experience ON and EVEN BRIGHTER
Examples Include: normal 26-year olds
(D) Full Conscious Awareness Entails:
Experience ON and as BRIGHT as possible
Examples Include: the Dalai Lama and a Maslowian self-actualized person
When all is said and done, it may be that both de Quincey and I are wrong about consciousness or awareness as switches that are either turned on or turned off. It may be that there is a mental continuum ranging from something like partial awareness, to awareness, to full awareness, to partial conscious awareness, to conscious awareness, to full conscious awareness. In which case, a kind of ‘switch,’ or something less definitive, gets ‘turned on’ very early in the animal hierarchy, and then all of mental reality is on some kind of rheostat-like system.
Bear, M., Connors, B. & Pardiso, M. (2001), Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain
(New York: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins).
Brefczynski, J. & DeYoe, E. (1999), ‘A physiological correlate of the “spotlight” of visual attention’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience , 2 , pp. 370–4.
Byrne, R. (1995), The Thinking Ape: Evolutionary Origins of Intelligence
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Byrne, R. (2001), ‘Social and technical forms of primate intelligence’, in Tree of
Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution , ed.
F. DeWaal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Farah, M. (1997), ‘Visual perception and visual awareness after brain damage: A tutorial overview’, in The Nature of Consciousness , ed. N. Block et al.
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Griffin, D. (1992), Animal Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Humphrey, N. (1998), ‘The privatization of sensation’, in Toward a Science of
Consciousness: The second Tucson discussions and debates , ed. S. Hameroff,
A. Kaszniak & A. Scott (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Lycan, W. (1995), Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Parker, S. (1996), ‘Apprenticeship in tool-mediated extractive foraging: The origins of imitation, teaching and self-awareness in great apes’, Journal of Comparative Psychology , 106 , pp. 18–34.
de Quincey, C. (2006), ‘Switched-on consciousness: Clarifying what it means’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies , 13 (4), pp. 7–12.
Roth, G. (2000), ‘The evolution and ontogeny of consciousness’, in Neural correlates of consciousness , ed. T. Metzinger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Whiten, A.
et al.
(1999), ‘Cultures in chimpanzees’, Nature , 399 , pp. 682–5.

1
The word ‘consciousness’is used in different ways, but not all of these uses reflect clear concepts or should be retained in technical discussions. In his target article Christian de Quincey (2006) notes that confusion about consciousness is widespread and sets out to distinguish two main meanings of the word. To my mind, however, his treatment of the subject is itself confused and the proposed distinction misses the point.
The author states that ‘consciousness’in its ‘philosophical meaning
… means the basic, raw capacity for sentience, feeling, experience, subjectivity, self-agency, intention, or knowing of any kind whatsoever’. This does not seem to be one capacity — as he puts it — but rather several different ones. He opposes this kind of consciousness to
‘non-consciousness’ which is ‘the total absence of any experience, subjectivity, sentience, feeling, or mentality of any kind’. This seems to imply that the presence of mentality of any kind is enough for consciousness in this sense. However, this is a sheer identification of consciousness with mental life in general and thereby consciousness loses its specific character.
The ‘psychological meaning’ of consciousness is illustrated by the author by the contrast between ‘being awake and alert’ and ‘being asleep and dreaming’. However, one may be awake and alert and yet unconscious of information that is being processed in one’s mental activity, as recent cognitive psychology and neuroscience have
Correspondence:
Gilberto Gomes, Laboratory of Cognition and Language, Universidade Estadual
Norte Fluminense, 28013-602 Campos, RJ, Brazil.
[1] See Christian de Quincey (2006), ‘Switched-on consciousness: Clarifying what it means’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies , 13 (4), pp. 7–12.
Journal of Consciousness Studies , 14 , No. 3, 2007, pp. 107–12

108 G. GOMES extensively demonstrated.
2 On the other hand, when one is dreaming one is conscious of what one is dreaming of. So the proposed distinction misses the relevant difference between conscious and unconscious mental activity.
The author claims that any being that has a mental life is conscious in the ‘philosophical meaning’. Those that are non-conscious ‘lack all psychic or sentient capacity’. It is sure that the adjective ‘conscious’ may be used either in reference to an animal that has the capacity of being conscious (even if it is not conscious at present) or in reference to an animal that is in the state of being conscious — the latter obviously being the most fundamental sense. But I claim that consciousness should not be identified with ‘all psychic or sentient’ capacity or states.
I think that the effort to clarify the meaning of consciousness should proceed in a different direction. We could first try to agree on some empirical criterion that allows one to distinguish between being conscious and being unconscious of something in some typical cases.
Then we may try to envisage other cases in which a person or animal may be conscious or unconscious of something. Finally, we should try to understand what the difference is between these states, that is, to propose theoretical explanations of it. The latter is of course the most difficult part.
The most obvious empirical criterion consists in asking a person about whether s/he was conscious of something. The case more easily amenable to experimental control is that of perception. The experimenter presents a stimulus and asks the subject whether s/he perceived it. If the answer is affirmative — granting that it is sincere 3 — I guess no one would question that the subject consciously perceived the stimulus. There is a point of controversy concerning the negative answer. Some philosophers claim that a person may have been conscious of a stimulus for a very short moment and have kept no memory of this at the moment of reporting.
4
There are conditions that may obviously lead to such a situation: a relatively long delay between the stimulus and the report, the occurrence of simultaneous or subsequent distracting stimuli, inattention, and so on. Suppose, however, that the subject was told to pay attention, knew beforehand that s/he would have to report, there was no
[2]
[3]
[4]
See, for example, Bornstein & Pittman (1992); Mack & Rock (1998).
Or if a correct answer is extremely improbable, so that guessing is excluded.
For example, Block (1995), concerning alleged cases of phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS CONTENTS 109 interference distracting her/him from the task and the report was given immediately. In such a situation, I think there is no reason to consider that the subject may have been conscious of the stimulus when the answer is negative. There is no point in speaking of consciousness of something if the subject her/himself does not at any time identify having had it, in spite of being able and willing to do so.
There are other contents of consciousness in addition to perceived objects or events. Note that I am using ‘content’ in a phenomenological sense here. If a person with delirium tremens hallucinates a spider, I will say that the spider is the content of her/his visual experience, even though there is no real spider present. It is important to make this clear because some philosophers prefer to use the terms
‘content’ and ‘object’ only in reference to real objects. When we dream, we are conscious of many things, either visually or otherwise.
Some of these objects exist in reality and are brought to the dreamer’s consciousness by memory; others are imaginary and result from a recombination of features of objects perceived in the past.
Thoughts, feelings and intentions are among the other possible contents of consciousness, but I do not have space to examine them here.
Some are difficult for the subject to express in words. Others may be such that the subject is unwilling to report or even to recall them.
Some stay accessible to the subject’s recollection, others very quickly become inaccessible.
Though the criterion of reportability serves to identify some cases in which the subject is or is not conscious of something, there is no reason to suppose that the actual capacity to report is an indispensable feature of consciousness. An animal may be conscious of something it sees, for instance, without being able to tell you so. An aphasic may lose her/his capacity to report what s/he is conscious of, but s/he certainly continues to be conscious. In such cases it is difficult to decide whether the subject was conscious of something or not. We know that brain activity is indispensable for consciousness, but we do not yet have a definite neural index of consciousness (though there are already many hypotheses concerning the neural correlates of consciousness), let alone of specific conscious contents.
The question of animal consciousness is certainly a challenging one. Few thinkers nowadays would agree with Descartes in refusing to grant non-human animals with any form of consciousness. But then the question is: Which living beings are conscious? Few think there is reason to suppose that plants or unicellular organisms are. By contrast, most cognitive scientists admit that higher animals have at least some form of consciousness. Where in the animal scale does

110 G. GOMES consciousness make its debut? This is certainly a very difficult question to answer.
5
An important point is not to identify conscious activity with mental activity in general. Cognitive science has proven beyond any doubt that many processes that are instrumental in shaping conscious experience and behaviour occur unconsciously. Baars (1988) has argued for what he calls a ‘contrastive analysis’, which compares instances of a certain performance done with and without consciousness. If ‘conscious’ were just a synonym for ‘mental’, it could be discarded from the technical vocabulary. It certainly cannot and thus should not be used in this general sense in technical language.
What was said above about animal consciousness leads to the question of the different forms of consciousness. We may admit that at least all mammals have sensory consciousness. On the other hand, it seems clear that no other currently living species have all kinds of consciousness that Homo sapiens has. Humans seem to have at least one distinctive form of consciousness, but it is not so easy to specify which form this is. Besides, there seems to be gradations in the conscious capacities of different non-human animals. Primatology has shown that chimpanzees and bonobos seem to be conscious in a higher degree than monkeys and other mammals (de Waal and
Lanting, 1997; de Waal, 1998).
Self-consciousness is often cited as a specifically human form of consciousness. However, the reference of this term seems not to be clearly circumscribed. Many non-human animals are probably conscious of their own bodily sensations and of their own movements, and in this sense can be said to be conscious of themselves. Another level of self-consciousness involves the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. This capacity has been demonstrated to be absent in most animals and often present in great apes. It emerges in chimpanzees at
4.5 to 8 years of age (Povinelli et al.
, 1993) while in humans it appears at 15 to 24 months (Anderson, 1984). It also seems to be present in dolphins (Reiss and Marino, 2001).
I would like to point out two higher levels of self-consciousness that may be specifically human. One is consciousness of being conscious of something. Suppose you see someone picking someone else’s wallet. It is one thing to perceive what is happening and to think about the thief, the victim and the act. It is another to be conscious that you are seeing this and to think about what may be expected of you in that situation, what you yourself think you should do, whether you
[5] See Seth et al . (2005); Edelman et al . (2005) .

CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS CONTENTS 111 will be in risk if the robber perceives you have seen the theft and your possibility of serving as a witness.
Another aspect of self-consciousness that seems important (and is closely linked to the previous one) is consciousness of decision making. An unconscious process may be responsible for the choice among different courses of action. However, a new dimension emerges when one becomes conscious of such an internal process of choice. When one is conscious of an intention to act before starting the action, one may not only anticipate consequences of the latter but also confront different possible courses of action (Gomes, 1999). One may check whether the envisaged action accords with other desires, objectives and values that one may have. It is this kind of consciousness that lead people to attribute a free will to humans that seems to be lacking in other animals.
We see that in relation to consciousness it is of paramount importance what one is conscious of. People may give different meanings to the word when they are thinking about different kinds of content of consciousness. This is related to the third meaning of consciousness that is mentioned in the target article (de Quincey, 2006), namely the
‘spiritual’ meaning, characterized by the author as referring to ‘a heightened state of self-awareness that involves increased ethical discernment’. When one says that X is ‘more conscious’ than Y, in this sense, one means that X is able to include more relevant and important aspects and considerations in the contents of X’s consciousness when forming an opinion or deciding about what to do.
Anderson, J.R. (1984), ‘The development of self-recognition: A review’, Developmental Psychobiology , 17 (1), pp. 35–49.
Block, N. (1995), ‘On a confusion about a function of consciousness’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 18 , pp. 227–87.
Baars, B.J. (1988), A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Bornstein, R.F. & Pittman, T.S. (ed. 1992), Perception without Awareness (New
York: Guilford).
Edelman, D.B., Baars B.J. & Seth, A.K. (2005), ‘Identifying hallmarks of consciousness in non-mammalian species’, Consciousness and Cognition , 14 (1), pp. 169–87.
Gomes, G. (1999), ‘Volition and the readiness potential’, Journal of Consciousness
Studies , 6 (8–9), pp. 59–76.
Mack, A. & Rock, I. (1998), Inattentional Blindness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Povinelli, D.J., Rulf, A.B., Landau, K.R. & Bierschwale, D.T. (1993), ‘Self-recognition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Distribution, ontogeny, and patterns of emergence’, Journal of Comparative Psychology , 107 (4), pp. 347–72.

112 G. GOMES de Quincey, C. (2006), ‘Switched-on consciousness: Clarifying what it means’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies , 13 (4), pp. 7–12.
Reiss, D. & Marino, L. (2001), ‘Mirror self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin:
A case of cognitive convergence’, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences , 98 (10), pp. 5937–42.
Seth, A.K., Baars, B.J. & Edelman, D.B. (2005), ‘Criteria for consciousness in humans and other mammals’, Consciousness and Cognition , 14 (1), pp. 119–39.
de Waal, F. (1998) Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes , Revised edition (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press).
de Waal, F. & Lanting, F. (1997), Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT
26th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) will be held in East Lansing, Michigan, May 31–June 2, 2007 with an opening reception at 6.00 pm, May 30.
The conference venue will be the Kellog Hotel and Conference Center at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. A large block of rooms has been reserved for the SSE at a special conference rate: $89/night.
Local arrangements are coordinated by Mark Urban-Lurain.
Roger Nelson chairs the Program Committee.
For details, please see the announcement and call for papers at www.scientificexploration.org/meetings/annual meeting2007.php
For inquiries, email:
AnnualMeeting2007@ScientificExploration.org
The overall theme of the 2007 meeting is ‘Pushing Scientific Boundaries: Interactions, Intersections, Interventions’. Invited speakers will help define themes to be developed further by contributed papers.
Special focus will be given to research and theory on Consciousness,
Alternative Medicine, the Physics of Time, and UFO research. Invited speakers include Peter Bancel, John Hagelin, Barbara Marx Hubbard,
Dieter Reinstorff, Glen Rein, Mark Rodeghier, and Daniel Sheehan.
The SSE provides a professional forum for presentations, criticism, and debate concerning topics which are for various reasons ignored or studied inadequately within mainstream science. SSE member interests cover a wide spectrum, ranging from apparent anomalies in well established disciplines to paradoxical phenomena that belong to no established discipline and yet may offer potential for scientific advance and the expansion of human knowledge. The Society publishes a peer reviewed journal, the Journal of Scientific Exploration , holds annual scientific meetings in the USA and periodic meetings in Europe.