Consciousness

We deny that all consciousness is consciousness of something. There is consciousness and the current content of consciousness. It is possible but unlikely that I would be conscious but conscious of nothing. (Holding your breath in a flotation tank is probably as close as you can get without artificiality.) Consciousness is the underlying background, non-specific cortical neurological activity that is necessary for experiential and behavioral processes.

Thus anything with a nervous system is conscious. But consciousness is of no particular significance in and of itself, it is merely a biological substrata for awareness, a powering up of the system so that it can be aware and reactive. What distinguishes organisms is not consciousness, but its content. The difficult question is why we associate consciousness with cortical activity.

I don’t seem to be conscious of what’s going on in my cerebellum or lower brain centers even if they serve as more than relay centers, i.e., they do information processing or are involved in the production of syntactic behavior.