ABSTRACT
Chapter three, “The ontology of consciousness,” brings to bear arguments from chapter two on the structure of consciousness. The chapter incorporates arguments from John Searle, Edmund Husserl, and Jean-Paul Sartre to lay out the structure of conscious experience: Searle’s notion of the “unified conscious field,” Husserl’s “internal time consciousness,” and Sartre’s “non-positional consciousness.” For each perspective, what emerges from consciousness when all three approaches to consciousness are integrated is an enduring point of reference—the self— with the capacity to focus conscious attention on the past as memories, on the future as anticipation, and among all sensory inputs of present experience. Essential to this point is the gap between what has occurred and what will happen. In the interstice, human volition and reasons for action are formed out of the nexus of beliefs and desires.
