The exponents of the five
leading ideas about consciousness and other professionals and the rest of humanity say things in
passing or anyway they will assent to things that are the result of their
having holds on their consciousnesses. A good selection of these things can be
put together from from books and articles. They are not thought up or
manufactured by me or anybody else. They're sure not from just my own hold on
my consciousness.
Your being conscious right now in
the ordinary sense, in any of the three ways exemplified by seeing rooms,
thinking of a name, and a want that comes on you, is:
something’s being had, the having of something,
something’s being held, possessed,
or owned,
the experiencing of something,
something experienced, only
subsequently theorized about as qualia or whatever,
something of you, maybe spoken of as subjective,
something sensible, i.e. sensed,
something directly apprehended,
your seeing, thinking, wanting also
in an ordinary sense of those transitive verbs,
something’s being in contact, met
with, encountered, undergone,
awareness of something in the sense
of its being there,
something’s being immediately in
touch,
something’s being apparent or
obvious,
something not deduced, inferred,
posited, constructed or otherwise got from something else,
something’s somehow existing,
something being for something else,
something being to something else,
something being on view, in view,
in a point of view, maybe subsequently labelled as subjective,
hence something’s being open,
provided, supplied,
something to which there is some
privileged access or special knowledge on the part of one thing,
something with which there is
acquaintance, maybe subsequently thought of as phenomenality,
what involves an object or content,
sometimes subsequently much elaborated,
something being given,
hence something existing and known,
something being present,
something being presented,
something being shown, revealed or
manifest,
something being transparent in the
sense of being clear straight-off,
something’s being open,
something being close,
an occurrent or event, not a
disposition or cause of such events,
something itself real,
something vivid,
something being vividly naked,
something being right there,
an object or content coming to us
straight-off,
something being an object or
content, theorized in terms of
aboutness,
in the case of perception the world
as it is for someone,
in the case of perception, the
openness of a world,
something proximal, not distal,
something in the light, maybe a
spotlight, onstage,
something with a qualitative feel,
as with all consciousness right down to the ground.
All that, I say to you, is data, and I sure
bet you it exists in other languages than English. You can get some reassurance
from the Germans and a bit from the French. Probably Latvians. It is a
database. The result of an empiricism.