On thoughtful consideration

[Magical Realist]

While I generally agree with Chalmer's broad designation of consciousness as experience--the private feeling of what it is like that characterizes everything that happens to us--I also acknowledge a vital element of thinking in our conscious states. We perceive an object like a tree, for instance, and unless it is given any thought, it slips away unnoticed in the stream of transient experience. We need to experience the object AND observe it for what it is for a few seconds, that entailing a brief conceptualizing of the object in its given otherness.

I have pondered what to call this act of knowing or understanding that completes the conscious act, and came up with what I call "thoughtful consideration." That is what we give our raw experience such that it has meaning and presence to us. Thoughtful consideration can be given to just about everything we experience--a feeling, a sensation, an object, a person, a situation, a problem, a possibility, an event, a topic of conversation, an idea, a memory, etc. So it is my conviction that this cognitive action of comprehension or "grasping" the felt data of experience is what manifests that data as being "about" something whole and intelligible in itself. It is the processing of the incoming data as "intentional" and referrent to a given ontic entity.

A whole thesis btw could be devoted to what we mean by "understanding" as opposed to perceiving or knowing something. We have a general sense of its meaning depending on the context of its useage. But generally it seems to refer to a being aware of the enlightening context or revealing "nature" of something. The rough grasping of the elucidating and true information clarifying and disclosing the meaning or functioning of an object or person or idea or situation.

[C C]

KANT: "Thoughts [abstract procedure] without content are empty, intuitions [manifestations] without concepts are blind."

I'd add that there are no interpreting "concepts", though, without memory or systematic information storage and retrieval. That's why even if a rock was internally present to itself as something, it would be clueless that _X_ even was "showing", much less be able to apprehend or classify what _X_ was or meant.

Even an infant has innate behavioral reactions to the new "stuff" it is experiencing. But that is partly chaotic, impulsive and without consistent self-direction. Not regulated like the discriminating, identifying and understanding of events and things at the level of an older child that has acquired language and learned knowledge.

I suppose someone would essentially have to be brain-dead, but with their sensory processing still producing phenomenal content that goes completely undiagnosed, unanalyzed, and non-reacted to... In order to achieve utterly "devoid of cognition" manifestations which have no awareness (via their normally organized, reciprocal responses to each other) to even validate that they are present.