The functional components of consciousness arise in and for interactions and are both direct and indirect. Attention, theory of mind, play, expressions of individual character, evidence of empathy and such are direct, while tiredness and the need for sleep are examples of the indirect, since they facilitate our empathic identification via the assumed relationship of consciousness with life. None of these generate presence, or rather the duality of presence and absence, but instead seem to presuppose it - they are forms that arise on it as ground. Beyond this duality there is a further non-functional component of consciousness which is that it can select, that it particularises, that it renders the general that into the particular this, and does so not always and necessarily but sometimes and optionally. The analogy with Set Theory is glaring: it is not that consciousness embodies the Axiom of Choice, but that this axiom expresses in a hyperbolic way an essential attribute of consciousness, one which is closely connected to its non-substitutability or impossibility of being cloned. It is necessarily difficult to speak about this, and never definitively, this unnamed firstness, not just consciousness but knowing, and knowing that it is here for the first time. Figures arise beyond the limits of denotation, such as of a movement in depth, a deformation of the surface of things bending them down into contentless self-presence, bridging the gap that determines some thing into something. Whatever it is the brain finds it hard to maintain: there is an extravagant expenditure of both thermodynamic and semantic energy that requires replenishment by sleep, the progressive suspension of the ontic, which itself is only a further involution of the identical ontological event.