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Sunday, 9 July 2017



The consciousness in dreamless sleep is not intentional, since it has no content, intentionality and content being coextensive, unless we admit that its content is no-content. If there is a desire to find a pure intentional consciousness prior to content it resolves into the problem of understanding how changes in content take place moment to moment within what is manifestly the same subjectivity. If a moment of consciousness is the activation of a unity in division of seer, seeing and seen, or of noesis, noema and horizon, it would seem as if all the hooks in the momentary structure are fully occupied and therefore it is not clear how the next moment of awareness can bring a new content to the same seer, or to a different but somehow equivalent seer. (And in that case how is the equivalence accomplished? How is it proposed, accepted, certified?) The obvious answer is that the prior moment is included in the horizon of the succeeding one. If this is not just begging the question then each moment of consciousness must include its own objectification, must be its own implicit other, since how else could it be identified with the fading memory of itself. Mostly it seems as if there are two kinds of intentionality, a normal non-reflexive kind that serves its turn and immediately falls into oblivion as when we carry on without explicit awareness of ourselves, and a special reflexive kind in which the noema is augmented with an awareness of the act, as when we are functioning 'mindfully'. This may be a matter of degree of salience, as if we are always mindful but only consider it in this way when the augmented component is above a certain threshold. Another approach is to consider that just as there are atoms of consciousness there are also molecules, in which intentional moments are chained together in various ways, as for example, tail to tail, or head to tail. It is hard to escape the conclusion that every moment of consciousness is very much more than itself, as if it includes the totality, but curled up in hidden dimensions.

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