  Considering what is taken as the ordinary consciousness of objects, Nishida’s analysis questions both the notion of consciousness and that of objects. We can explicate Nishida’s first concern, with the ontology of consciousness, in the following way: If the basic form of consciousness did not have the reflexivity of self-awareness, then the “consciousness” of objects would be blind, as it were, like a mechanical or neurological reaction to stimuli with no awareness whatsoever, and no way to account for awareness. The problem appears in attempts to define consciousness in a non-circular way. A definition of consciousness as a state of awareness or sentience, for example, or a state in which there is something it feels like to be in that state, merely replaces consciousness with its synonyms. In a sense, awareness is irreducible, but it has a logical structure that accounts for its connection to a world of objects. Structurally, awareness mirrors itself in itself, in a manner analogous to the way an infinite set mirrors itself in its equivalent subsets, or to the way an ideal map mirrors itself in all accurate representations of that  map.[2]   (Note that the English awareness can be used without the word self, but the Japanese word that translates as self-awareness is an inseparable compound, ji-kaku.) If such self-awareness is to have logical necessity, it cannot be explained as a contingent property of a particular mind or consciousness that sometimes reflects on itself, that is, as a second order consciousness of being conscious of something.