>>27152965Secondly, it depends on other nervous influences conveyed to and from all parts of the body and its environment, in particular from different parts of the brain itself, including parts where the traces of system memory are stored. Therefore, we cannot locate a conscious nervous reaction in one place. All sorts of other reactions in different parts of the brain and its external environment are inseparably fused with each conscious reaction that we strive to follow, observe, record, and hypothesize about. But this merger is carried out in a manner that embodies the maintenance and continuity of personal interest, including our relations with the past and the anticipated events. Ordinary physical ideas lead us to a mere uncoordinated fusion of countless events, but with no conception whatever of how these events are the certain active pattern that we are familiar as those of us in a coordinated environment, both spatial and temporal, of what is of central interest to us.
Finally, when we see what can be meant by the consciousness as an event, or
As a series of events occurring in the nervous tissue of the brain, we are led to Kant's conclusion that in the world we perceived as the known world, each distinguishable element is constituted by its relations to other elements, so that to speak of perception as something occurring in some particular part of it and at some particular time, is without meaning. To the world of perception, there is no outer limits either in time or space, since space and time are only relations within the world of perception itself. It may seem obvious to us at first, as if in perceiving anything, we perceive only the here and now, but in reality, we are also aware of what is around us, both in space and time.
