Primary Consciousness Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 125):

Perceptual categorisation, for example, is nonconscious and can be carried out by classification couples, or even by automata. It treats signals from the outside world — that is, signals from sensory sheets and organs. 

By contrast, conceptual categorisation works from within the brain, requires perceptual categorisation and memory, and treats the activities of portions of global mappings as its substrate. 

Connecting the two kinds of categorisation with an additional reentrant path for each sensory modality (that is, in addition to the path that allows conceptual learning to take place) gives rise in primary consciousness to a correlated scene, or "image." 

This image can be regenerated in part by memory in animals with primary consciousness, but it cannot be regenerated in reference to a symbolic memory. By this I mean a memory for symbols and their associated meanings. And so an animal with primary consciousness alone is strongly tied to the succession of events in real time.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, perceptual categorisation is the construal of experience (signals from sensory sheets and organs) as perceptual meaning.

By contrast, conceptual categorisation is the organisation of such perceptual meanings into systems of perceptual potential, differentially weighted, during experience, according to evolutionarily selected values (e.g. attractive vs repellent).

The correlation of ongoing construals of experience as instances of perceptual meaning with the system of value-weighted perceptual potential yields a scene or "image" that is the range or cause of a mental process unfolding through a senser (primary consciousness).