The term consciousness does not refer to a some thing but expresses a difference in experience, or the coordinated family of such differences. It is something I know that I have because of the distinction perceived or inferred between things as they are and how I take them to be, and again the ground for this understanding is in the interpretation of changes purely on the side of how I take things to be, on the side I call subjective. These include both changes in state of mind, which are changes in the relationship of the constituents of the subjective world, and changes in the perspective determining the subjective world effected by a more or less voluntary change in what is taken for granted, as for example when I move between the natural attitude and the reduction to phenomena. The total situation becomes increasingly complex as the various and inescapable levels of representation are incorporated, and it is tempting to try to resolve this complexity by employing the term consciousness as the unlimited ground for all experience, including my own acts and the 'I' itself (now thought of as improperly inferred). This strategy leaves a gap, or rather, it fails to close a gap, the lacuna residing in the fact that it is always my experience that is sought to be illumined. An alternative strategy then is to take the 'I' as fundamental, as the unsignifyable act of signifying, as pure interpretation without external reference, and consciousness and all of its associated phenomena, experience in short, as secondary, imagined, dreamed or given. The one who would parsimoniously rewrite the cogito as 'thought is' has it exactly in reverse, 'thought' and 'is' are the disposable inferences.