ABSTRACT
It seems quite a good idea to approach an understanding of awareness by first delimiting the sort of space that it occupies. You can get a surprisingly accurate impression of what an unknown animal will look like by seeing where it lives, what it eats and so forth. The same strategy may work in relation to awareness, though most writers, especially if they are philosophers, take the opposite approach. They often try to define a whole collection of what they regard as essential attributes of consciousness, things like intentionality, self-reference, emotional tone (the list varies from writer to writer), and then imagine what sort of space would be filled by their particular animal.
