But it seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.
To elucidate the ways in which the rational psychologist is nevertheless seduced into making this slide from formal representations of self consciousness to a metaphysics of the self, Kant examines each of the psychological arguments, maintaining that all such arguments about the soul are dialectical.
(This is Lycan's 'simple argument' for a higher-order representation account of consciousness. See Lycan 2001b).
The subsequent claim is that the unification of a manifold requires synthesis; immediately following the characterization of an object he states that "all unification of representations demands unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them" (B137).
Logic "separates out of our manifold representational connections of consciousness those [representations] that have a legislative [gesetzgebenden] character for the development of our knowledge [Wissen]" (L I: 1).
Indeed, there are now multiple representational theories of consciousness, corresponding to different uses of the term "conscious," each attempting to explain the corresponding phenomenon in terms of representation.
Passive apperception may be characterized simply by saying that here the associative form of representational connection is predominant,[52] whereas when "the active apperception successively raises representations into the focal field of consciousness," this active passage of representations obeys the special laws of what Wundt calls "apperceptive connection" (PP II: 279).
He develops an account of mental representation and provides an analysis of consciousness in terms of mental representations, arguing that this results in a fully natural explanation for something that was otherwise mysterious.
What is being worked out during this period is what, exactly, the relation of consciousness, representation, and thought really is.
