Locating the essence of consciousness in the possession of qualia is a wrong track even though it rightly entails that inwardness and first-person perspective are fundamental. It asks too little, however. What if the qualia had no meaning, or if they had no realisable connection to anything real, to anything that conditioned their own possibility? This might represent a kind of raw or wild subjectivity, but it would be truly epiphenomenal - an inessential addition to whatever is really going on. Prioritising qualia as the key to consciousness begs the question of a bottom-up approach, where the higher function of understanding would be one more fragile emergent built on top of another. What if consciousness is more integral to understanding, that is to a concrete relationship to what is, and subjective feeling were an abstraction of that? Say that understanding were the true epiphenomenon, something added on to a blind but open-endedly versatile process of accommodation. Even in this case it would seem that the space of understanding, its entire repertoire of possible moves would be delimited by the current state of the process. There would be no possibility that understanding could bear an original relation to the truth, to the very openness of that open-ended process. Here the process of accommodation would be like the elaboration of an axiom system, one that was forced to grow through concrete and contingent encounters with its own limitations in which understanding played no role. This might be the case, but doesn't seem to be. Understanding has its own processes of self-elaboration and these seem to lead the embodied process rather than lagging behind it - or at the least would be coextensive with it. What drives understanding is a sort of intellectual thirst which is far in excess of its requirements. So again, understanding might be an abstraction or reduction of a kind of pure intelligence which we occasionally encounter in a mode we can only call super-conscious. The question might be rephrased as asking how deep into its ground the roots of consciousness extend. If you stretch the evolutionary paradigm far enough does it eventually become identical to the emanationist one?