The Qualia Of Primary Consciousness Through Systemic Functional Linguisics

Edelman (1992: 135-6):

If animals having only primary consciousness also have qualia, they cannot report them explicitly either to a human observer or to themselves, for they lack conceptual selves. Like flashlights illuminating a room, their qualia, if they occur, exist only for the duration of the remembered present of the scene. We can only adduce their possible presence by observing the behavioural responses of these animals.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the reason animals having only primary consciousness cannot report qualia to humans or themselves is because they lack the means of reporting them: language (which provides 'conceptual selves').

The qualia of primary consciousness are instantiations of value-weighted perceptual meaning potential — the correlation of current perceptual categorisation with the value-category memory established through previous experience.

This constitutes the instantiation of a mental process of perception, mediated by a senser, with perceptual meaning as its phenomenal range or cause.