2.13 What consciousness is: a definition and framing of the problem

Consciousness is the total awareness a person has about who they are and what their life experience is like. This paper will show the aspects of that total awareness, which include having and experiencing small and large life events, and how those events might lead to your total experience or awareness of life as a whole. There is a functional consciousness, which is someone being aware of their immediate environment and how to function in it physically and intellectually, and there is a consciousness of self, which is on a deeper level and is a psychological awareness of who you are and what your life is like emotionally. In that sense if you are "aware of yourself" you are aware of your feelings and your thoughts, are aware that you are experiencing feelings deeply in some way and thinking deeply in some way and that therefore you are an "aware" and conscious being, that has a rich inner life, world or mental processesing higher than that of less intelligent animals. Each single experience someone has, even an experience as small as seeing an object move, could have a larger intellectual and emotional impact because humans have a complicated intellectual makeup (both conscious and unconscious) that makes this experience deeper and richer and leads to people being more conscious of things. If an experience is deeper, then you are probably going to be more conscious of it. An experience can be small, but if you internalize it and make it more significant (possibly by comparing it to the other experiences in your life, or understanding a deeper psychological meaning behind it) then your inner world becomes larger for the duration of that experience - so you might have deeper feelings about it because it "means" more to you. It means more to you because you are comparing it to other events in your life which helps you understand it better, what it means, why you care about it, how it makes you feel (and understanding how you are feeling and being aware of those feelings is a part of consciousness).

There are more questions to ask about the nature of consciousness other than “how do I know I am aware” and "what kinds of awarenesses lead to consciousness". The only two things to be aware of are thoughts and feelings, if you are aware of something external that object is only real in the sense that it generates thoughts and feelings. So consciousness is also essentially awareness of your own thoughts and feelings. Feelings can happen that people aren’t aware of, but these feelings are probably going to have unconscious consequences on other feelings now or later, or even thoughts. If consciousness is complicated, then the only way it could be complicated is though complicated feelings, because thoughts are only relevant because they generate feeling, without feeling thoughts wouldn't mean anything. However, thoughts can lead to complicated feelings. Your experiences lead to complicated feelings both during the experience and after, and all your experiences have an impact on your feelings during other experiences (a human's internal world of processesing helps make this happen). Unconscoius thoughts help an experience to be deeper they can generate feelings and could be labeled as feelings because that is what is important about them – that they cause feeling. If you know what a feeling is and label it with a thought then you can understand better how your feelings interact with each other. If you think about it that way, all your many feelings at any instant could be explained with many words, or thoughts. That is how an experience of a feeling can be more complicated, because it has a larger impact beyond the individual feeling and because it fits into a larger psychological whole of what is going on in the entirety of you your mind (or your life). These thoughts and feelings are what generate larger amounts of feeling and thought – and those components and your awareness of them help bring consciosuness to life. If you had a feeling that you didn't "feel" you wouldn't be conscious of it, but it might have an impact on feelings and thoughts later on.