  Lycan argues that consciousness can come in a wide spectrum of degrees of richness or fullness of consciousness, and that there is a meaningful sense in which a system with a minimal degree of consciousness is not “really” conscious (1996, p. 8). Admittedly, this sounds a bit paradoxical, but the point seems to be that it is counter-intuitive for us to consider very low degrees of consciousness, as it is hard to imagine the contents of very simple mental states. One reading of this is that Lycan is arguing that the predicate ‘conscious’ is vague, without committing himself to the view that consciousness is distributed according to a linear scale.