Consciousness And Unconsciousness

Unconsciousness as a term could refer to two things, with people at large predictably using each sense interchangeably without explicit clarification.  When a person's body has been forcefully struck by something, to give one scenario, that person could black out, their consciousness pulling away from their senses.  Outside observers might call this person unconscious because they are not displaying signs of perception.  Indeed, they might be motionless and almost seem dead.  The fact is that it is possible for them to still be experiencing distinct thoughts and mental imagery within their mind.  Unconsciousness in the first sense does not mean nothing is being experienced.  It just means that there is no perception of seeming or real external events and stimuli.

A dream still involves consciousness or else there would be no experience of mental imagery.  Thus, simply having one's consciousness retreat away from the senses does not mean one is unconscious in the strictest sense of the term.  It just means that someone is not consciously experiencing sensory perceptions.  There are actually two kinds of "unconsciousness," and only one of them truly involves a total lack of conscious experience.  Of course, the lack of clear explanations and the plague of philosophical apathy mean that people could overlook this distinction fully while embracing errors.  The distinction still remains.

This is yet another way of proving that consciousness is not derived from the senses, but sensory perceptions that are derived from consciousness.  Only one of them can exist without the other and it is plain that it is is sensory perceptions that require a consciousness behind them to give rise to them in the first place.  The idea that this primacy is inverse is a delusion born from a lack of personal comprehension of the concept of perception.  Perception as a general mental characteristic is perception with or without explicit input from the senses (though the intellect can be considered a sense that is very different from the other senses, and at least minimal awareness of reason is needed for any awareness of even basic perception).

No, this has nothing to do with whether metaphysical idealism is true--matter could precede human consciousness and create it, but consciousness is still epistemologically dominant and necessary for any sensory information to be experienced.  Perhaps more people would be willing to accept both at once if they did not assume that these logical truths force a person to embrace some unprovable or somewhat irrelevant stance on whether matter gives rise to human consciousness or whether human consciousness brings the material world into existence.  Misunderstanding and exaggerating what follows from consciousness not requiring senses deters even some who would otherwise have no problem realizing that one form of unconsciousness is not another.

Entire ideological systems have been contrived because individuals did not stop themselves from believing that which cannot be proven.  Metaphysical idealism and emergent naturalism are contradicted by the fact that there are other things beyond mind and matter--like logic, time, and space--that have natures that distinguish them from the two existents that receive far more direct attention, mostly from people who understand neither very well.  Someone who is uninfluenced by petty assumptions is capable of seeing how the difference between lack of sensory awareness (not that perceiving something with the senses makes it a part of external reality anyway) and fundamental awareness of self, concepts, and the laws of logic.