The Levels of Consciousness

There are three levels of consciousness:

1. Sensation;
2. Perception, and;
3. Conception.

On the lowest level, sensation, everything is a fleeting patchwork of disconnected stimuli—an organism that has access only to sensation would have no way of acquiring any information, it could only mechanistically respond to whatever stimulus is currently in front of it, as might a cell or virus. At the further stages beyond this, up to the formation of a conceptual consciousness, there are the implicit concepts of entity → identity → unity:

1. On the perceptual level, we directly perceive entities–as against disintegrated sensations–at this stage we do not know what the things are, and we may not even recognise that when we see the same object on different occasions that it is indeed the same. At this stage the concept “entity” is implicit—existence exists.
2. On the next step of development, but still not at the level of the conceptual, we become aware of this entity as against that one. This is the stage of consciousness that most of the higher animals have achieved. On this level there is the implicit concept of identity—A is A.
3. Finally, we leave the animals behind, when man grasps particulars–identities–he can grasp the relationships among these identities—recognise that certain objects are similar to others, mentally group them accordingly, and call them by the same word (table, chair, etc.). From this point on we no longer view objects as animals do–as unrelated to one another–we rather classify things in terms of similarities and differences of their identities and we thus view things as groups of similar things. At this stage, when I grasp this entity, I grasp not only entity and not only this entity as opposed to others, but I now grasp this man, or this chair, etc.—i.e. this as a part of a set of similar things. The implicit concept of this stage is unity—a unit is “an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members.”¹