What is the Relationship Between Awareness, Perception & Experience?

There are a very diverse range of views concerning the nature of awareness, perception and experience. In this book John King considers both the nature of the three individual phenomena and the various possible links which could exist between the three phenomena. Some of the main themes covered are the idea that awareness and experience are equivalent, experience without awareness, perception without awareness, sleep and dreaming, panexperientialism, and higher-order monitoring.

The phenomenon of awareness is a very important one. One could reasonably believe that if part of the universe is totally devoid of awareness, and has no 'capacity' for awareness, then this part of the universe has no moral worth in its own right; awareness seems to be a very valuable part of the universe. Attempting to understand which parts of the universe have awareness requires an understanding of how awareness is related to perception and experience. Various different views concerning these issues are outlined and compared. Here is an excerpt: "There are numerous possible relationships between the phenomena of awareness, experience and perception. In this book my aim is to consider these various possible relationships with the purpose of attempting to make some progress in understanding how these three phenomena are actually related. This attempt is not aided by the fact that I can only know about what I am aware of (and you can only know about what you aware of). By this I am simply stating an obvious fact about one's relationship with the world. So, one cannot know if there are states of feeling, or states of awareness, in that which is not one - for example, in a stone or in a bumble bee. Similarly, one cannot know anything about the Eiffel Tower if one has never become aware of the existence of the Eiffel Tower (one has never visited it, seen pictures of it, heard anyone talk about it, etc). One is ignorant about the states of the world that one is not aware of. However, it would obviously be woefully inadequate to simply assert that what one is not aware of does not exist. The simple fact that one cannot become aware of the states within bumble bees and stones does not mean that these states do not exist; just as one's lack of awareness of the existence of the Eiffel Tower does not mean that the Eiffel Tower does not exist. There is clearly an important difference between that which one is not aware of but could become aware of, and that which one is not aware of and cannot become aware of."