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Two thoughts.
First, cognizant action and consciousness are entirely distinct phenomena. Cognizant action – knowing what you are doing – does not require consciousness.
Second, I formulated consciousness as I did, i.e., <I, S, W>, because I could find no articulation of the concept of consciousness anywhere – no coherent statement of what consciousness is. Lots and lots of language in terms of feeling, internal processes, “feels”, etc. Most especially, I have sat through what seemed like innumerable lectures in which the lecturer talked about consciousness as though it were some kind of formless object, and then worried about how the physical thing that is the brain can support the non-physical “thing” of consciousness. That whole way of talking is incoherent nonsense.
A final comment is that it seems clear that whether my formulation is complete or not, an inescapable aspect of the concept is that we don’t call something conscious if they do not have a world, in the Descriptive Psych sense (and as articulated at some length in my paper). The object, processes, events, and states of affairs a person is and can be aware of must form a world, i.e., something that is a connected whole (as articulated in What Actually Happens) and includes the person. That leads to the the solution to the “problem of consciousness”: the individual’s brain (protoplasmic, silicon, or whatever) must provide for the operations that articulate the concept of world, i.e., the transition rules of the state of affairs system.
