%0 Journal Article %J Organon F %D 2012 %T Sentience, Awareness, Consciousness %A Pokorný, Martin %K sentience; awareness; consciousness; recognition systems; Gerald Edelman %X The paper starts from a Searlean dilemma – we are bound to view consciousness as ultimately explicable by scientific means, yet science appears to give us no means for explaining the specificity of consciousness – and presents what I see as a plausible though speculative story for avoiding the brunt of the dilemma. The basic idea is (a) that consciousness, or anticipations of it, should be seen as pervasive throughout the biosphere; (b) that the biosphere, following Gerald Edelman, can be seen as the sphere of meta-systems irreducible to purely physical particles and forces; and (c) that it is plausible to view “full waking consciousness” as occurring at a very high level of meta-systematicity; with the conclusion (d) that full waking consciousness is both an expectable outcome of the biogenic forces and, in virtue of how it combines them, a very singular case. %B Organon F %V 19 %P 51-63 %U http://www.klemens.sav.sk/fiusav/doc/organon/prilohy/2012/2/51-63.pdf %9 State %2 Papers %3 5163 %# 1