Higher-Order Consciousness Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 112):

In contrast, higher-order consciousness involves the recognition by a thinking subject of his or her own acts or affections. It embodies a model of the personal, and of the past and the future as well as the present. It exhibits direct awareness — the non-inferential or immediate awareness of mental episodes without the involvement of sense organs or receptors. It is what we as humans have in addition to primary consciousness. We are conscious of being conscious.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional linguistic theory, these features of higher-order consciousness are provided by language.

Higher-order consciousness involves a senser mediating mental processes — of perception, cognition, desideration, emotion — that range over, or are caused by, the meanings of language (phenomena) construed of experience, or a sayer mediating verbal processes that range over the wordings that realise the meanings of language.

However, more than this, higher-order consciousness involves the projection of the meanings of language into existence through a senser mediating cognitive or desiderative mental processes, or the projection of wordings that realise the meanings of language, through a sayer mediating verbal processes.

Through the projection of wordings, higher-order consciousness also involves the enactment of the self and intersubjective relations as interpersonal meaning (propositions, proposals, and assessments).

And from a textual perspective, higher-order consciousness involves the weaving together of the ideational and interpersonal dimensions of consciousness in ways that are coherent for a given context.