Ordinary awareness

Ordinary, every-day awareness of the external world is dominated by two conditions: dependency on sense data, and the necessary mental reconstruction of the discrete units of sense data into internally sensible wholes that can be recognized and identified. Crucial to this process, which results in "understanding", is memory wherein the mental wholes or patterns corresponding to the objective world's phenomena are stored. One peculiarity of everyday consciousness is the requirement that it should respond at enormous speeds to sense stimuli. In order to do this it takes a short cut to understanding by reducing recognition time. This is achieved by matching the reconstruction of discrete date to the memory at stages where such reconstruction is only partial. Normally, the correct match is made with the corresponding internal structure in the memory. Sometimes the match is premature and error results. However, such error is usually corrected with more sense-data input which may come in continuously from the stimulus-object. The real limitation and significant source of error in everyday consciousness lies in the structures, maps, schemata, types, concepts, forms, etc which are in the memory, and which, as an imposition on the understanding process, require sense-data constructs to conform to.