Abstract

Published in two parts, the present article addresses whether and how self-awareness is necessarily involved in each of the six kinds of consciousness that The Oxford English Dictionary identifies in its entry for the word consciousness. In this second part, I inquire into how self-awareness enters consciousness4, or the immediate awareness that we have of our mental-occurrence instances, consciousness5, or the constitution of the totality of mental-occurrence instances which is the person’s conscious being, and consciousness6, or the highly adaptive general mode of the mind’s functioning that we instantiate for most of the time that we are awake. Consciousness4 is a kind of occurrent self-awareness because, in being conscious4, it is part of oneself that one has occurrent awareness of; although one need not also, at those times, be aware of oneself as such. Consciousness5 consists of those of one’s mental-occurrence instances that one is now conscious4 as one’s own or one can remember being conscious4 of and appropriating to oneself. Whether consciousness6 must involve self-awareness is difficult to answer because the common concept of consciousness6 does not imply an answer, and we have no clear view of what consciousness6 uniquely consists in; that is, no account of consciousness6 as yet successfully distinguishes it from all of the mind’s other general operating modes.