In our daily lives, we take our consciousness for granted. Perhaps we even get bored with life, but we should never cease to wonder at the phenomenon of consciousness. Our minds are not just insensate matter, but are open to the world. Unlike a tree or a stone, our consciousness has a unique capacity for intentionality, which means that consciousness is about something else, representing and extracting data from the external world.
Intentionality of Mind
The intentionality of our minds presents to us a complex array of integrated sensations. We take in sensory information through our senses, but we also assign these sensations to distinct individual objects. The sensations are not some unruly chaos. When we talk to a person, for instance, we do not hear a sound, see a shape, feel a tactile sensation in separate domains, in a chaotic medley. Instead, we integrate these sensations, attaching them to a single individual. We then distinguish the sensations associated with the person, from other sensations in our environment, so that we can distinguish the individual person, from a nearby table, or another person, etc.
We complement this sensory integration, with conceptual integration as well. Concepts represent general classes of things, not individual particulars. A general concept of a triangle cannot be a particular triangle, let us say, an isosceles triangle, since an isosceles triangle would not cover a scalene or an equilateral one. We apply concepts to particular impressions, to gain a sense of their identity, classifying them according to prior experience. We conduct all these complex processes of sensory and conceptual integration, unconsciously and without effort. The intentionality of the mind is instantaneous, presenting us with a trustworthy map of the world we use as a navigation tool.
In this essay, I cover different models of consciousness, theories that attempt to explain this process of sensory input, openness to the world, and then final integration into our mental map of the world. The first theory we will cover associationism.
1. Associationism
A major figure in associationism is David Hume. Hume understood consciousness in terms of a process of the copying of impressions. Impressions are experiences. For instance, I have impressions of redness and sweetness when I eat a red apple. The mind works by copying these impressions in the form of ideas. So, after immersing oneself in the experience of eating the apple, with all its associated impressions, the mind retains traces of the experience.
Ideas are fainter than impressions, and over time they decay even more. The memory of eating the apple is not quite as vivid as the actual experience.
Both memory and the imagination work with ideas. The memory just copies the impressions, while the imagination can rearrange the ideas from impressions. The imagination can form crazy images, as we see in surrealist painting like Salvador Dalí, but the imagination nevertheless cannot exceed impressions. That is, we cannot imagine what has no basis in impressions.
So, our consciousness works by collecting impressions, and then tracking relationships between them. Impressions relate to one another in three ways, according to Hume: by contiguity, resemblance, and causation. The mind tends to connect impressions that are contiguous, or next to each other, in space and/or time. So, if the mind of another person sees the repeated contiguity of myself and my apartment, then this person’s mind will start to associate me and that apartment, drawing the conclusion that I must live there. If we see, for instance, two apples that resemble one another, we will start calling them by the same name. If two events have a repeated connection, occurring one after the other in regular fashion, we form the idea of a causal relationship. (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part I, Section IV).
Through these associations, we develop more and more complex ideas. But, the ultimate constituents of our mental life are simple ideas. We associate them through experience.
2. Kantian Synthesis
Hume’s model of consciousness, moving from simple impressions to complex ideas, clearly dispenses with any innate structures of the mind. Nothing can be innate in the mind for Hume, since all our ideas come from external impressions. Ideas are only copies.
But, we have to challenge the idea that the experience we have of the world, is possible, strictly in terms of associations of impressions. Is it possible, to have the articulate and well-structured, conceptually determined and intelligible, experience that we have, strictly in terms of copying individual impressions?
But, Immanuel Kant thought that individual sensations are inadequate to explain our experience. For Kant, the mind is both receptive and spontaneous. The mind receives external sensations, but it also incorporates a cognitive architecture that forms sensations into coherent experience (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A50/B74). The associationist model is strictly receptive. The mind receives impressions, and then copies them. The only active part of the mind is the imagination, which can only reconfigure what the mind has received.
But, for Kant, sensations by themselves are just an unruly manifold, i.e. a diverse array of disorganized sensations. So, an apple, taken merely in terms of sensations, is just an array of redness, sweetness, firmness, etc. In order to convert this manifold into a coherent image, we first need to collect individual impressions into a continuous unity over time. The apple is not just bits of disconnected experiences. We do not just copy individual instants of the apple, but integrate them over time, uniting past, present, and future.
The apple is not just one moment. It is a succession of moments. We experience the different sensations associated with the apple at different moments of time—first the redness, then the feeling of firmness when we clutch in our hands, etc.
How do we unite these different moments, so that we do not just have one individual sensation disconnected from the other? We experience the apple at different times, and yet we associate these temporally distinct sensations with one apple. If the mind is just a copy machine, it would take copies of sensations at distinct moments, generating a manifold of disparate sensations, individual slices of time without a connecting thread. But, we don’t observe only a manifold, in spite of the different times at which input from the apple engages with our consciousness. We observe a coherent, stable image, that is able to endure even through interruptions in perception. The apple is still there, even if we stop observing it.
Consciousness unites the different moments, assembling the apple over time. This assembly of various parts of the apple cannot just be passive. Even if we step away from the apple for several minutes, we can form a continuous idea of the apple, when we turn to look at it again, showing that we are synthesizing the various impressions of the apple.
3. Imagination for Kant
The imagination, for Kant, is what conducts this synthesis. The imagination represents objects, even when they are not present. We need the imagination to retain sensations of things, even they are not occurrent and present to the mind. So, when eating the apple, I get an occurrent sensation of sweetness. But I still connect this sweetness, to the apple, even when I do not experience the sweetness. I need imagination to generate these stable features of things, even when they are not present.
There is much more to unpack in this account of experience, but I will conclude here. A crucial piece of experience for Kant is the ascription of all sensations to one consciousness (KrV A122). We do not just grasp individual impressions. Instead, we connect them in one continuous consciousness. I am always having sensations. When I wake up in the morning, then when I do some work, to the time at which I go to bed, it is always I who am having representations.
4. Unity of Apperception
Kant calls this unity in one consciousness the “unity of apperception” (KrV A122). Without this unitary consciousness, we would not be able to form experience, a coherent representation. We would just get input, like a computer, that simply responds algorithmically with output, without ever putting together the input into a coherent picture.
Hume famously denies this unity of apperception. He thinks that there is no “constant and invariable” impression of the self that continues through all changes in consciousness (Book I, Part IV, Section VI). We only have impressions of mental states, like pain and pleasure, grief and joy, etc. We do not have an impression of the self.
Yet, Kant would say that the self is a precondition of representation. How can we have a representation at all, without a stable subject that has it? How can we even have any knowledge at all, if our experience is not rooted in one subject, but just consists in a series of isolated instances?
I myself favor the Kantian view of consciousness. Please drop a comment below, if you agree, or think differently!
You should also try reading other post by Prof. Daniel here.
Kalki and Nietzsche’s Übermensch
Author Bio: Dr. Daniel Dal Monte
Dr. Daniel Dal Monte is a philosophy professor and author based in Philadelphia, USA. He earned his doctorate from Temple University, focusing on philosophical inquiries into agency and moral law. His works often intersect ethics, metaphysics, and theological ideas, emphasizing the structure of human motivation and happiness. As an author, he is known for The Realm of Possibility, a science fiction novel exploring themes of grief and the moral implications of reversing death. His scholarly work includes examining Kantian philosophy and exploring Stoic and Epicurean ideas in contemporary contexts.
You can reach out to Prof. Daniel Dal Monte directly here to learn more about his experiences.
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