 Our understanding of what is meant by “conscious” might also be sharpened by contrasting conscious states with what we can readily conceive of keeping from their company. A leaf’s fall from a tree branch, we will likely suppose, is not a conscious state of the leaf—an experience in the desired sense. Nor, for that matter, is a person’s fall off a branch a conscious state of that person. Rather, it is the feeling of falling that is paradigmatically conscious, if anything is. Dreaming of falling would also be a conscious state in this sense. By contrast: we can be said to sense (and so adjust) the position of our limbs when dreamlessly asleep. But this proprioception, we may suppose, is not conscious—provided it does not feel anyhow to us sleepers, as it commonly does when we are awake. And in general we may understand a contrast between the familiar sensory experience we have of stimuli (when, say, these smell or sound somehow to us), and other discriminatory responses to the same stimuli in the absence of any such experience—which we may still intelligibly describe as sensing or perceiving. (We can readily think of the sensing or perceiving attributed to plants and simple artifacts in this way.)