Nature is an intrinsically chaotic and dangerous place and eventually, something lethal will find its mark. An awareness is any entity that normally has the capacity to respond to the information contained in changing energy patterns and hence defer detrimental or fatal circumstances. Awareness is intrinsic to nature, sustained by energy and not some sort of ephemeral extra-existential phenomenon assumed by such dualistic concepts as spirit and sensory manifold. Awareness is a complexifying manifestation of life, across all the phyla, which incorporates the capacity to respond to energy interactions in a manner which is modified by memory structures. As the complexity of the memory structures and their associated input and feedback increases, so the capacity for self-awareness also will increase. Self-awareness is the incrementally emerging phenomena which evolves as a living entity acquires the capacity to be aware of its own sensory input process. Not only is the colour and intensity of a source of light sensed but the sensing process event itself can be appreciated. Self-awareness is the apparent phantom that manifests itself when awareness links are established to the sensory and memory structures themselves. The entity can thus sense itself sensing and so become aware of a self-entity. Conscious self-awareness thus manifests itself when a memory structure, comparing input perception streams in real time, develops the capacity to internally include the input perception process into the input perception process. Once such a feedback loop is established, whereby the time sequence perception process of a memory structure is itself input into the perception stream, self-conscious identity is realized.

Awareness is perhaps not unlike a belt or a closed circuit. Until the belt is fastened it cannot take the tension needed to support the trousers. Until the circuit is closed, the LED will not light up. Energy is required to set up and sustain both scenarios.

Sensory feedback about the consequences of volition delineate the boundaries of individual identity. The perceived consequences of pricking one's finger, feeding, indulging in sex, sleeping and waking, all contribute to the conceptual awareness of the physical limits of a self. By the time that any individual mind has developed to the stage of being able to reflect in awareness upon itself and upon its existential circumstances, it has already been constrained by processes which occur independently of its existence and volition. The degree to which social peers and associates accept, reinforce or reject a projected self image limit the social and environmental boundaries of the identity.

Nevertheless, although introspective awareness is not intrinsically objective because the organic structures of memory are dynamic and fallible, yet an objective existential awareness can be aspired towards by relentlessly refining communicated perceptions and divesting them of whatever is conventionally local, speculative, hypothetical, or based on insubstantial and unreplicated evidence. An existential awareness supposing itself to be objective must have purged itself of the biases of nurture wherein religion, superstition, prejudice and self aggrandizement are encouraged. Since such absolute objectivity is unattainable, all philosophical statements are constrained to be nothing more than opinions about supposed simplifications.

Any awareness, unable to respond to life's dangerous perturbations, as is the case during sleep or because of physical incapacity, is vulnerable to nature's deceptions and relentless recycling. Eventually the brief participation of an awareness in the process of nature comes to an end and after death an individual awareness ceases to have any form of individual existence.