(noun. /ˈkɒnʃəsnəs/) : the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.

Where language is used to comprehend and navigate the world around us,
it is also used to articulate an internal world to ourselves.
The voice that exists in the mind as you read this text,
the voice that emerges as you reflect on lived experience
is not, and will never be you.
This is an illusion of symbolic interpretation.

Self-awareness, reflection, and imagination are understood here as a symptom of language.

An archer fires an arrow into the woods, but it passes too swiftly to be perceived.
An observing mind will fill in the gaps between the two physical states
(an arrow fired and an arrow landed).
This imprints a dual sequence in memory.
Our senses provide the capacity to turn this sequence into comprehension;
through imagination, we form a story.
Enough of these sequences create an overarching narrative, and this, in turn, becomes us.

The self is a story retroactively told.
(noun. /ˈkɒnʃəsnəs/) : the symbolic distance between changing states.