I'm curious how this epiphany came to you. This strikes me as very similar to the Buddhist concept of the Five Aggregates, which describe five elements that combine to make up our existence: Physical form -> Sensation -> Perception -> Mental formations -> Consciousness
I was just trying to understand what people mean when they say that "consciousness is an emergent property", which always felt like a hand-wavy explanation. I was weighing that explanation against panpsychism and then this thought emerged.
I'm wondering which sort of consciousness is under scrutiny. We know when we're conscious and unconscious. E.g. Awake vs Asleep. Even animals exhibit that dichotomy.
The other consciousness is self-awareness. Which is hard to detect from the outside. Some animals may have it. Do they understand when they look silly? Do they recognize themselves in a mirror? These may be diagnostic.
It's important to know which one is intended since they are so very different, at least in their distribution among living creatures.
I claim that this is not true as stated. The main bulk of the habit-forming nearly everyone needs to do when learning to lucid dream is to recognise when you're dreaming, because almost nobody natively knows when they're dreaming. You have to learn to spot it by paying attention to the things which the dream machinery is very bad at (like text, clocks, and your own breathing).
Awareness, definitely. I'm using consciousness in the same sense Julian Jaynes used it (he used to call the other form "reactivity", a term that never quite caught on).
