There are many different kinds and qualities of consciousness, some considered usual or ordinary and others not so. It varies rapidly in the course of a day, although the variations are not accounted for, or not to a great degree, partly because at the same time consciousness is considered to be continuous or one. There is room for this latter understanding (who exactly has this understanding?) to be wholly mistaken; consciousness might equally well be discontinuous and without any underlying unity. (And who exactly has that understanding?) You can talk of being conscious or of having consciousness, but not of making or doing consciousness, and there is no single verb 'to conscious', although 'to be aware of' or 'to focus attention on' sometimes stand in for this lack. On the other hand you can have sex, or make love, and there is also a single (transitive) verb which for some reason is considered vulgar and functions as an obscenity. Again, despite the various grades and qualities of consciousness it is considered to be all or nothing, and is not generally thought to consist of a mosaic of different interlocking components, although there may be some neurological evidence that this is so. It is perhaps a little like weather - there are various kinds of weather, and some, by drawing attention to themselves seem to be more typically representative of weather than others, concrete universals of weather, but they are all equally weather. If someone says, 'In this place there is no weather at all' this is usually taken to mean that the weather rarely varies. But say there was no atmosphere, and no nearby source of radiation, say you were on a spaceship in deep space, wouldn't it still make sense to speak of the conditions of dust and cosmic rays as the weather? So is it the case that there is always awareness, always consciousness, something like the way that there is always weather - is it any more than a way of speaking, an always possible transposition of certain general ideas?