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Guys, I fear you all are asking somewhat different questions and perhaps using some different vocabulary to express them.?But interesting anyway. Joe -- Might this have something to do with your questions:?I have read that when a frog is confronted with a flying insect that there is a stimulation of its optic nerve, but that nerve is not connected to it's brain.?The signal of the optic nerve bypasses the brain and goes straight through a pathway to the frog's tongue, and the frog automatically uses its prehensile tongue to capture the creature in an extraordinarily fast way. Question:?Does the frog "know" anything??Is there any "phenomenological" event going on in the frog when this sequence happens??Is the frog conscious of the event?? (Well, as always, what to you mean by "phenomenologica" and what do you mean by "conscious"l??As I see it, such questions necessarily requires some philosophical considerations, though the old philosophers alone can't answer the questions.? By the way, Michael.? The old philosophers (the ancients and medievals) didn't have a distinct idea of "consciousness" at all.?They used the word only in reference to that very complex idea, "conscience" which itself implicitly includes the idea of "conscious".?It wasn't until Descartes that the philosophers started to distinguish "consciousness" from "mind" ("mensa"), mensa being the whole complex of cognitive and affective powers and their objects.?As I remember it was Locke who finally started to consider consciousness (awareness) apart from an object of consciousness.? If anyone thinks that cs. and its objects are not distinct, try G.E. Moore's article about the distinction.?It's a tiresome one but powerful.?(As I remember it is either "A Defense of Common Sense", or "Refutation of Idealism".)?He was the great teacher of Russell and Wittgenstein. Michael,? The free will experiment is fascinating, but not relevant to my original question, which concerned only the necessity for recognizing some simplest elements in cognition, *how* structured (complex) concepts and judgements are effected, and what guarantees their truth. Same old philosophical basics about the relationship between the a posteriori and a priori.