The following points sketch a short outline of my suggestion of how to conceptualize consciousness and communication in structural linking.

1. Systems theory has developed the thought that there is a difference between consciousness and communication which can be observed as the structural linking of two autopoietic systems. That means that every system needs the other system for its own reproductional process. 
2. Consciousness and communication are structurally linked with each other in an exceptional manner. Both systems are also necessarily and constitutively structurally linked with each other.
3. In systems theory the idealistic thought (above all of the German philosophy of consciousness, e.g. Kant or Fichte) of a clear deduction from consciousness to everything else including communication is substituted by the thought of an autoconstitution of consciousness and communication in the process of structural linking .
4. With regard to the structural linking the idea of communication without any subject of communication means self processing communication. Where there was a subject in the philosophy of consciousness there is structural linking of consciousness and communication in systems theory.
5. No sentence about consciousness and communication refere to an empirical reality but is only conceptionel because there are no other observers of consciousness and communication but consciousness and communication themselves. The observation of consciousness and communication is processed either consciously or communicatively. The observation of consciousness and communication necessitates a symmetrical conception of both systems involved in structural linking. That means in structural linking the observation of consciousness and communication can only be observed as symmetrical systems; that does not mean that both systems are symmetrical in an absolute manner, which requires an absolute observer that cannot even be imagined.
6. The difference between consciousness and communication is the starting difference for systems theory. The difference between system and its environment, which is regarded as starting difference cannot be the authentic starting difference because only the difference between consciousness and communication in structural linking enables consciousness or communication to process their own and any other difference, enables consciousness and communication to observe any difference at all.
7. A corresponding definition of the medium says that the medium generates the structural linking. Whatever generates the structural linking is called the medium. The most common medium without any concrete and empirically observable form is sense. Sense is a supermedium for the structural linking of consciousness and communication. Sense is a medium insofar as it allows and effects the constitution of forms in both systems consciousness and communication. The medium makes the structural linking in such a manner that sense as a form results from sense as a medium, that sense results from structural linking (constitution of the medium) so that structural linking results from sense (constitution of the form).

Dr. Oliver Jahraus 
Universität Bamberg 
Lehrstuhl für Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft
An der Universität 5
D-96045 Bamberg

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