Instead, all there is to a person is a complex, rapidly changing stream of mental and physical phenomena, connected by causal links and inextricably interrelated with the rest of the universe.
Not only does the self depend for its existence on the constituents, but the constituents only acquire their existence as distinct parts of the stream of mental and physical events by being associated with a single self, which, regarded as a constitutive property, produces the basis for postulating the individual in which the various properties of the self inhere.
Policy-making is moving beyond these assumptions and debating whether DMC law is evolving to recognise differences in kinds of mental disorder or disability that obviate the need for two streams of mental health law.
Other descriptions included an analysis of consciousness as a form of relationship or act of the mind toward objects in nature, and a view that consciousness was a continuous field or stream of essentially mental "sense data," roughly similar to the "ideas" of earlier empirical philosophers.
In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life". For James, consciousness is a continual flow of mental activity.
O.K., James Joyce it may not be, but show me the woman to whom this sort of stream-of-consciousness, self-assessing mental clutter is unfamiliar and I'll show you the person who will not think "Bridget Jones's Diary" is both completely hilarious and spot on.
Furthermore, it explains why certain dispositions, such as aversion, persist in the mental stream of an individual (because appropriation follows the initial experience of a first moment of aversion), and how it is possible to overcome such dispositions (when appropriation is associated with factors that condition non-aversive states of mind).
In the formula of dependent arising (quoted above in §3.3), the awareness that arises in conjunction with the activity of a given sensory system is itself impermanent and momentary: visual awareness and visual object, for instance, are both events within a mental stream of continuing relations.
In particular, associationism can be used as a theory of learning (e.g., as in behaviorist theorizing), a theory of thinking (as in Jamesian "streams of thought"), a theory of mental structures (e.g., as concept pairs), and a theory of the implementation of thought (e.g., connectionism).
The self is not seen as a cognitive nucleus which stays constant amidst the stream of changing sensory impressions and mental deliberations, but rather as the entire set of such sensory and mental events which are interconnected in complicated ways.
When William James appraised kinds of mental activity in the stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and their dependence on habit), he too was practicing phenomenology.
