When one is aware of something, say, your mug on a table, are you automatically aware that you are aware of it? That is the question I will ponder in this post.
There are multiple levels of awareness, and this plurality of levels complicates the question. When I am aware of my mug on the table, surely I am aware that I am aware of the mug on the table, but I might not be aware of the color of the mug, or the angle of the mug. I might be aware of the angle of the mug in a practical way, but not in such a way that I am also aware that I am aware of the angle of the mug. Let me unpack some of these distinctions here.
First, conscious awareness is the kind of awareness required for discourse. When I see the mug and can talk about whether it has coffee or tea in it, I am utilizing this form of awareness. In this case, the ordinary case of awareness, we might say, when I am aware of something, I am aware of the contents of that awareness in such a manner that the contents are accessible for reflective thought and speech.
Second, there is a form of unconscious action-awareness. At least with sight, we process perceptual information along two streams, so that one stream is not conscious but guides action, while the other is conscious, yet does not hook up to actions (at least in the smooth way that the first does). When this second kind of consciousness is in play, we are not aware of what we are aware of. One might pick out obstacles visually in this manner without noticing what one is doing or even being able to direct one's attention to it. Here, one is aware of the contents of awareness only practically, that is, in such a way that the contents are accessible for action-guidance, in particular, for fine-tuning actions directed toward the object in some way (adjusting angle of approach of one's hand to the coffee mug, for instance).
Conscious awareness can also be more finely distinguished into different levels. At the object-level, I am aware of objects, such as my mug and the table it sits on. At a more fine-grained level, call it the property-level, I may pick out the properties of these objects: I may notice the color of the mug or the texture of the table. At a less fine-grained level, the event-level, I do not notice individual things, but arrangements, such as something passing through my visual field, some odd noise, or a mass of objects. One may be consciously aware at any of these levels or none of them, and this awareness may or may not co-exist with the unconscious action-awareness. Each level is conscious, and hence transparent, but the transparency of one level does not entail any awareness of other levels. One cannot decompose higher levels in finer ones, nor assemble finer ones into higher ones, except by directing one's attention in particular ways. When one attempts to decompose an image from memory, one often finds that some of the lower-level facts are not available.
Ordinarily, one's conscious awareness is a certain combination of levels of conscious awareness, with action-awareness seeming to come along free. I am now aware of my computer, the way the text forms paragraph blocks, and the background's whiteness. Nevertheless, I am not particularly aware of what all the words say, until I direct my attention to them. Most of what I am aware of is a background, which is only fleshed out when I direct my attention to it.
Thus far, I have not endorsed transparency about conscious perception. There is a third level of awareness, however, which I will call reflexive awareness. This is the kind of awareness which allows me to be aware of my awareness as an instance of awareness. With conscious awareness, I can be aware of the contents of my awareness. With reflexive awareness, I can be aware of the fact that those contents are contents of awareness. This form of awareness enables us to think about thinking, talk about how we see, and recognize that we are aware of something fallibly.
It is in virtue of our capacity for reflexive awareness, I would claim, that we feel as though it suffices for being aware of being aware of something that we be aware of that thing. That is, it feels as though it suffices for my being aware of being aware of a mug that I be aware of the mug, but in fact that is an illusion produced by the fact that it takes no effort for us to make ourselves aware of that awareness because we are capable of reflexive awareness.
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