We experience the world in the first instance through our perceptive faculties or senses of sight, hearing, touch, and taste. The immidiate response to stimuli through these faculties is biological – that is, we see, we hear, we feel. Much of this response is routine, reflex, normal, part of an hourly or daily routine, mainly taken for granted, some perhaps even boring. The response can be thus passive or routinely reactive. We can simply gaze at the scenery or flick away the annoying fly, chew the food or spit out the piece of bone.

Occassionally, or frequently in some environments, the stimulus carries a message that, although purely biological in the first instance, triggers off what is known as an ‘affective’ response. In the landscape we have been idly contemplating, a lion appears. The affective response is what we know as emotion and in the language of affect psychology emotion is biological response informed by ‘scripts’ – that is, our awareness that lions or police at our door can be dangerous. An affect can also be positive and someone we love could enter the landscape being viewed, or knock on our door, so that instead of fear we may experience the affect of pleasure or joy.

Much of all our experiences based on our perceptive and emotional faculties is routine, except in times of crisis, whether of a contented or unhappy nature. Whether we can improve our lot in the practical world or move to a higher order of being depends upon a higher set of faculties, which are very difficult to describe. These are cognitive faculties and they embrace both intelligence and the much more difficult to define faculty or sense of ‘awareness’. Before trying to define our awareness, we need to deal with the semantic environment.

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