Experience, Awareness and Consciousness: Suggestions for Definitions as Offered by an Evolutionary Approach

An evolutionary point of view is proposed to make more appropriate distinctions between experience, awareness and consciousness. Experience can be defined as a characteristic linked closely to specific pattern matching, a characteristic already apparent at the molecular level at least. Awareness can be regarded as the special experience of one or more central, final modules in the animal neuronal brain. Awareness is what experience is to animals. Finally, consciousness could be defined as reflexive awareness. The ability for reflexive awareness is distinctly different from animal and human awareness and depends upon the availability of a separate frame of reference, as provided by symbolic language. As such, words have made reflexive awareness – a specific and infrequent form of awareness – possible. Conciousness might be defined as the experience evoked by considering, i.e. thinking about experiences themselves. If there is a hard problem of explaining consciousness, than this actually must be considered as the hard problem already met when trying to explain basic experience, since its nature remains elusive.