Frances to list members... Below is my roughly edited version as culled from Peircean written passages of what Peircean consciousness is purported to be. It would be interesting to see if Peirce is correct, and how his theory stands up now in the face of recent findings and studies in fields currently dealing with consciousness. ------ Consciousness is simply living, and in live organisms this state entails being variously unconscious or subconscious or preconscious or conscious. It is a quasi mental action for many nonhuman organisms or a mental action of the psychical psyche for most humans, but it will vary by degree depending on the kind of organism having it or the sort of organism bearing it. Consciousness by definition, and for it to be structurally consistent with the phenomenal categories under the general philosophy of realist pragmatism, is a trident that involves feeling and reacting and knowing.
Feeling is pure consciousness, and is that trait of consciousness which may entail say a fleeting instance of time as a passively felt quality, without any recognition or analysis of what seems to be on the part of the living host. Reacting is brute consciousness, and is an interruption into the field of consciousness where there occurs a sense of insistence toward the resistance of an external fact, such as engaging another thing of matter or life like illness with the goal of perhaps a cure. The consequence of reaction is behavioral habits of conduct like a display or gesture or deed. Knowing is sure consciousness, and is a synthetic consciousness that tends to bind qualities and facts like time and space together with an awareness of sensing and willing and thinking and finally of learning about phenomena. Consciousness in the world of phenomena originally emerges in organisms as continuant things or representamena that are not yet existent objects or signs. It is a case of the self solely alone representing the self by the self to the self for the self as the self. As a qualitative state of representation, it is fundamentally iconic in essence and substance and presence. It is hence logically senseless and without any logical basis in fact, because it cannot be found as being false or true since it remains neither. Consciousness is therefore mainly of interest to psychologists as building experiences that are preparatory and contributory to semiotics or semiology, but is of little interest to logicians. The state of consciousness and the study of psychology is however of interest to logicians at least to the extent that such mental acts do account for the desire that logicians initially have for wishing and seeking and wanting truth in the first place, which desire is something that logic alone cannot account for but ought to. ------
