Objectivism And Consciousness Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 67):

In many domains, this ["objectivist"] approach worked enviably well (and still does), but when the mind was put back into nature by nineteenth-century studies of physiology and psychology, a series of difficulties began to emerge. One of the first of these difficulties was that the observer could no longer neglect mental events and mental experience. He could no longer ignore consciousness itself or the fact that conscious experience was intentional — always in reference to an object. The mechanisms of this consciousness were not directly transparent, nor could consciousness be studied directly as an external object — at best, it could be introspected or indirectly inferred from the behaviour of others.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the construal of experience as observations, and their reconstruals as scientific theory, are mental events, mental experiences.  Observations and theories are the content (meaning) of consciousness, as are the objects construed of experience as phenomena (meaning).

The mechanisms of consciousness are the 'inner' processes of consciousness: mental processes that project interior content (ideas) and verbal processes that project exterior content (locutions).  These are distinct from the 'outer' material and relational processes of an embodied brain — the physiological form that realises the semiotic functions of consciousness.