OK, here's this topic again; I'll bite: I think Albert Einstein pretty much nailed the distinction between physical time and the perception of time: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." Facetiousness aside: it seems evident that "awareness" is merely when one part of the universe has built a dynamic (and necessarily incomplete) model of another part, and (self) consciousness is simply when the part modeled includes part of the model. What's the big deal? It's like looking at yourself in your house through a security camera. The video of yourself isn't some magical ghost in the machine (though it's convenient to pretend). This consciousness mystery cult that afflicts otherwise apparently intelligent folks is bemusing. To indulge in psychobabble: at root I suspect it's a compensation for an attachment to a stern self-image of righteous reductionist rationality whose breakdown erupts in rash rank amateur mysticism. Discussions of "consciousness", however clever and glib, strikingly parallel religionist's confused and definitionally unanchored discussions of "the soul" (at least to the extent that undefined terms can be commensurable). Einstein again: ³There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.² Those with a strong need to appear to themselves to adhere to the former have a hard time suppressing their natural human appetite for the latter. Maybe the sense that there's a solvable Mystery of Consciousness is merely another consolation prize we award ourselves for knowing our jellyware vessel's incapacity to contain more than measure zero of the unbounded. And, it's more fun (if not math-fun). Al, that punchliner: ³Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.²