I appreciate your reply, however I would partially disagree. Consciousness is always there, and we call sensing what is mediated by our sense organs interacting with the external world, that is, perceiving.

It's a class of experience radically different than, say, proprioception or feeling. One is externally mediated, the other is endogenous. Consciousness (in the phenomenal sense) is the superclass of both.

Cognition, or meta-consciousness, makes salient specific aspects of our experience/awareness, so that I'm very well aware right now of the pixels of my monitor as I write this, and much less so of the expansion of my rib cage as I breathe, or whatever subtle noises might be going on out of my window. However, I never really stop being conscious of them.