Of course there is a difference. You are probably conscious right now of more things that you don't even register, like the movement of your chest while breathing, sounds outside of your window, etc. It's indeed the difference between consciousness and metaconsciousness, the latter being the ability to re-represent an experience to your cognition (which remembering is an instance of).
A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were conscious just a moment before waking up.
> You are probably conscious right now of more things that you don't even register
I would say this is a contradiction.
> A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were conscious just a moment before waking up.
This is begging the question. It seems possible that we were conscious of our dreams if we remember them and were not conscious of them if we don't.
It's not a contradiction, it's just precise definitions. Have you ever had the experiencing of noticing how a sound has been going on for a while, only when it becomes really obnoxious or when you point your attention to it? We are constantly _conscious_ of stuff without processing it _congnitively_.
On dreams, I explicitely left out the dream scenario from my experiment. I'm only asking whether the moment of waking up feels like "lights up" or not...
You weren't conscious of the sound before you were conscious of the sound. You can of course be conscious of things that you're not paying attention to, but in that case you know they're there.
A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were conscious just a moment before waking up.