Primary Consciousness Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 112):

I have made a distinction, which I believe is a fundamental one, between primary consciousness and higher-order consciousness. Primary consciousness is the state of being mentally aware of things in the world — of having mental images in the present. But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future. It is what one may presume to be possessed by some nonlinguistic and nonsemantic animals (which ones they may be, I discuss later on).

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, primary conscious involves senser-mediated mental processes — of perception, cognition, desideration, cognition — ranging over (or caused by) the contents of consciousness, these being the systems of perceptual meaning potential that an organism has construed of experience.