I would like to draw attention to Edmund Husserl's phenomenological proposal regarding the nature of consciousness before moving on to discuss some of the contemporary perspectives on our subject. According to Husserl, we can talk about consciousness at least in a tripartite manner when our interest on the subject is epistemological.
1. Consciousness as the total real phenomenological consistency of the empirical self, as the intertwining of psychic experiences in the unity of their course.
2. Consciousness as an internal perception of one's own psychic experiences.
3. Consciousness as a collective name for all kinds of "psychic acts" or "intentional experiences." (Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations. Volume 2. p.81. Routledge. 2006)
Obviously we are not exhausting all the perspectives, but the three selected by Husserl are of great interest for our understanding of the phenomenon. The first of these is of special interest to contemporary psychology, as it refers to the flow of consciousness as an interconnected sequence of experiences in the subject. We include here perceptions, representations of imagination and fantasy, acts of conceptual thought, presumptions and doubts, joys and pains, hopes and fears, desires and volitions, etc., just as they have a place in our consciousness. And with these experiences in their integrity and concrete fullness, their component parts and their abstract moments are also lived; these too are real contents of consciousness1. Internal and external perceptions and conceptions fit into this stream of consciousness, as well as the apprehensions that are made of them at different levels of volition, feeling and intellection. The stream of consciousness gives the phenomenological unity of the ego's experiences. We could add to what Husserl said that this flow shapes the empirical and experiential ego, the ego that indexes and serves as a reference to personality, the different masks that are integrated into the experiential process. These masks or personae can come into conflict depending on the greater or lesser semantic congruence of the actions that constitute them, and produce a fracture of the empirical or egoic conscience of the individual. This form of consciousness is a narrative, and as such an empirical object (even when the narrative incorporates transcendental elements). The empirical or phenomenological ego per se is independent of the specific contents of its separate narrative, for it is simply the ordered and unified interconnection of the contents of consciousness. As Husserl points out: "contents in general have their legally determined ways of uniting, of merging into broader units; and as long as they become and are unity, the phenomenological self or the unity of consciousness has already been constituted, without that a principle of its own is also necessary for this"2.
The second proposal by Husserl is consciousness as inner perception. The inner/outer semantic operator on which the common use of consciousness as an action in which the mind examines psychic and non-physical contents is based is very imprecise. Internal perception is not limited to pondering the psychic and spiritual contents, it is not only the experience of thinking, feeling and volition, but it must also include all the contents that refer to the interior of our bodies.
The third proposal is consciousness as a comprehesive designation of all sorts of mental acts and intentional experiences. The proposal, which Husserl analyzes from Brentano's psychological theories, requires the elucidation of whether the intention is sufficient to demarcate all psychic phenomena, since this is a sine qua non condition to be able to apply the concept of consciousness to all acts of the psyche. As Husserl notes, the greatest difficulty occurs in considering whether intentional feelings exist. According to Husserl “some feelings are to be reckoned among intentional experiences, while others are non-intentional”3.
“We spoke previously of «feelings» of liking or disliking, approval or disapproval, appreciation or contempt, experiences that are obviously related to the theoretical acts of assent and dissent, of considering probable and improbable; or with acts of deliberate judicial or voluntary resolution, etc.”4
On the other hand, there are the most obvious unintentional feelings such as those associated with psychic acts of pain or pleasure according to the information of our internal senses for homeostasis. This question sheds light on the question of dharma discussed above: dharma ends where intention ends, although consciousness extends beyond dharma.
1Cf. Husserl. Ibid p.82.
2Ibid.p.86.
3Ibid page 110.
4Ibid.
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