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2016-10-20
Awareness and experience
Is awareness specific to specific parts of an experience?
When we are aware of seeing an apple, are we aware of all other sounds, shapes, tastes, etc which occur simultaneously?

2016-10-26
Awareness and experience
Reply to Pooja Soni
It's difficult, if not impossible these days, to explore questions of consciousness without asking 'what narrative does the data currently tell us?' We now understand that awareness shifts quite dramatically, consciousness shifts dramatically, depending upon the task. It's literally impossible, and not at all useful for survival, to be aware of everything (there is simply far too much going on inside and outside the body). If we were aware of everything we'd be overwhelmed by data. So we are only aware of snapshots. Intuition is snapshots of 'recognition', a phenomena now studied and confirmed many times over now (refer to Kahnemans work on bias and thinking). Consciousness is literally snapshots of reality. It's also why science naturally extended from philosophy because reason and logic alone are not capable of understanding reality but of course we cannot escape a 'philosophical' bent. It's natural for us. Humans need to learn why we are intuitive animals in need of reason.

2016-10-26
Awareness and experience
Reply to Pooja Soni
Our experience of sensing familiar things (the degrees of familiarity matter) is different in quality and scope of our experience of sensing things we are less familiar with or have no previous knowledge of. Our awareness works like a three-dimensional form and it necessarily involves perspective, meaning that there seems to be no absolute or ideal self of the object of awareness. For example, no two apples are exactly alike in all aspects of their being apples taken together; i.e., in taste, color, volume, shape, mass, etc. So what is the idea of an apple? Is there just one apple determining and judging our awareness of it? Or is there an epistemological space developed in our consciousness of a variable apple abstracted from our repeated experience of the fruit?
As there probably is no absolute/ideal apple (THE APPLE), there seems to be no specific set of exact qualities to cognitively verify the validity of our expeience of AN APPLE.

Our awareness of things takes place in time, no matter how fast and in how short a span of time our mind processes the information involved in the awareness of a thing. For familiar things, awareness involves the processces of receiving the sense data at the current moment (actually across a space of time, spanning from T1 to T2) of actual sense experience, retrieving previously accumulated sense data, and matching these data. These processes do not happen all at once. We are not sure if there is a specific order in which the various components of the data pass through the bottleneck of our consciousness one after another, but I suspect the order is determined by the priority the experiencing subject's mind determines when the call for the data processing comes. Say, when you are starved and you see an apple, I believe the component information your mind prioritizes may be the juicy taste, probably supplemented very soon by the feel of the fruit's flesh that you have as data from your previous experiences. But yes, as I said it is like a three-dimensional thing, the component pieces (some or more, as required by the case) of information often come together because they overlap across a considerably perceivably significant span of mental space and time. Then the components soon disengage from the composition.

The focus on the specific component sense details would also depend of the kind of awareness in question. A hungry man's awareness of an apple would be generally different from a graphic designer's awareness of an apple, when they simultaneously see the same apple from nearly the same angle and direction. The priority details would also be different when the same person is aware of seeing the same apple as a graphic designer and when he is hungry.

These are some of the ideas coming to mind when I see your question. Please glean just the immediately relevant parts. They rest may be relevant when we look at the question from a larger perspective.