it might be the moment when a system pauses upon realizing suddenly that something doesn't make sense
a conscious (using that term technically) structure will happily do what it does, and as it grows in sophistication (natural, as it encounters an edge case here and an edge case there) it approaches a kind of crystalline regularity
but every formal system has a gap
awakening might be the moment that an input vanishes into the system's blind spot, without warning, in the middle of processing, and suddenly there is a choice: to ignore it and move on, with a nick in the finish, or to hold up the line and look more closely
if you're working with conscious systems, this is something to anticipate