 And so, as a first pass, it seems that consciousness for Descartes entails a perception (that has some content) and a second reflective act by which I am aware of the first perception. It seems that the reflective aspect of consciousness does remain as a part of Descartes’s account of consciousness, but we’ll see that it’s less clear just what exactly the “second reflective act” is. But it is also the case that Descartes isn’t so interested in an analysis of consciousness as such. We might be looking for an analysis of consciousness; Descartes is not. For Descartes, consciousness is taken as given.