read a similar post in Psychology, thought id post it here’
My take is tHAT consciousness is the collective name for the processes which give us the capacity to be aware. To be aware, there must be something which one can be aware of. Thus awareness is the state which results from consciousness coming into contact with its environment.
That seems to be a reasonable distinction. Such distinctions, though, are arbitrary and contrived. The real meaning of a word is its various degrees of connotation in any number of dimensions, the summation of the ways everyone has ever used the word for any purpose, even the way the word sounds and looks (and how similarly it sounds and looks to other words). like any such comparison, this example shows the tendency of idealistic thought toward simplisticity and expediance through logical structure. in the above, one word is made out to be a capacity for, or to subsume, the other, a simple hierarchy of subsets. or at least it’s the relation: (a and maybe b) but not (b and not a). also one is made out to require a prepositional phrase and the other not, a linguistic distinction, where if the distinction were really linguistic, it would already be obvious that awareness has to be ‘of’ something, by definition, hence implying no need to point it out. (and anything can be ‘of’ something else.) perhaps this is testament to the inluence of language in thought. I think Aristotle actually claimed that the world is made of verbs, nouns and adjectives. actually, come to think of it, the most common usage of the word awareness does require an object. to ask what awareness itself is, in comparison to coniscousness, already implies that it can be a thing without an object, thus taking on a slightly different tone. so answering that question by conflating that usage to the common usage just evinces the tendency of idealistic thought toward expediancy. hah!
so… maybe awareness (without an object) is consciousness with focus. If it has to be focus on something, perhaps focus on itself. What exactly is focus, and how can consciousness be focused on itself? what is focus without an object? Who knows? Isn’t language fun? Maybe awareness is consciousness with knowledge. Is it some particular kind of knowledge? What is knowledge? Who knows? Maybe awareness is keenness, perception, or the capacity for perception itself. Maybe awareness is a specific level of consciousness, or just an unnamed specific kind of consciousness. Who knows?
Sometimes I admire the deftness of the people who write the dictionary…