Irrellus, ill take up the slack here, not with standing , just to add a formal ingredient into this mix.
The question of knowledge may not only suggest an equally nebulous concept of consciousness, but entropy, decay may be the progenitors of the minutest elements of what such concepts may become from a potential formative basis.
Consciousness and knowledge too, may be understood in continual conjunctive relation, but as such they may be overlapping processes , where the more overlap the more signification.
There is no insignificant knowledge , and that is why we are calling conscious knowing a qualification to it. But that may imply that automatic action reaction type inorganic behavior we-differentiate, the difference between the built in automatic and willful .
In fact there is no contradiction , only a narrowly defined band in a spectrum of larger bands, if the analogy is appropriate.
In this scheme there is no difference between a thing defined by what it does , or one that is what it is by virtue of how it does it, and more likely is the evolution of attributing increasing inner causation to previous outer ones.
When this last frontier between inner and outer melts away, then the picture becomes clearer.