Rich Experience and Sparse Awareness : Sensing More Than We Know

Consciousness is often treated as unitary phenomenon.We challenge this and propose a framework that parses it into two functionally distinct representational media.Reviewing dominant theories, as well as studies of perceptual failures, neural activity, visual search and attention – we argue that phenomenal experience arises early as a detailed, analogue, and relatively generic representation of the physical world.Awareness, a later and more idiosyncratic representation of the world, results from enriching phenomenal experience via relevance-filtered semantic knowledge.This Multi-Representational Media (MRM) account unifies perception, memory, and cognition, reconciles rich and sparse consciousness views, and reframes concepts in unconscious cognition research.