Sense Perception
On the lowest level of awareness–sensation–all experience is of “isolated, fleeting data […] a kaleidoscopic succession of new worlds, each swept away by the next as the stimuli involved fade or change.”1
Human infants start their lives in this state and remain in it for perhaps a matter of months; but no one reading these words suffers such a state now. When you the reader look, say, at a table–not think of it, but merely turn your eyes toward it and look–you enjoy a different form of awareness from that of the infant. You do not encounter an isolated, ephemeral color patch or a play of fleeting sensations, but an enduring thing, an object, an entity. This is true even though the stimulus reaching your eyes is the very one that would reach an infant’s.2
The difference is borne from the fact that on the perceptual level, you have experienced many such similar sensations in the past, and your brain has gained the capacity to retain for a short period and automatically integrate them: “it has put them together to form an indivisible whole.”3 Recall that a sensation is lost the instant the given stimuli is no longer active upon the sense organ—this is not so for a percept. In order to properly integrate these fleeting sensations into entities, or identities (see: The Levels of Consciousness), you must be able to store away said sensory impression for the duration that is required to integrate it with other relevant data—but there is still no choice involved yet. Man’s power to choose exists on the conceptual level—the percepts are given and stand as the data that he must choose what to do with.
In the act of looking at a table now, you are aware of its solidity—of the fact that, unlike brown water, it will bar your path if you try to walk through it; of its texture—unlike sandpaper, it will feel smooth to your fingertips; of many visual aspects outside the range of your glance, such as the underside of the top and the backs of the legs; of the heft you will feel if you lift the object; of the thud you will hear if you bang on it. All this sensory information (and much more) is tied to and cued by your present visual sensation. The result is your ability, when you look out, to see not merely a patch of brown, but a table.4