Layers of the Given

On waking consciousness, patterned experience, and the new role of AI in shaping what we see before we understand

When you open your eyes on an ordinary morning, light filters through the curtains and a chorus of small sensations greets you—the pale outline of the window, a bird chirping outside, the warmth of a blanket against your skin. Yet what you experience in that first moment is not raw sensory data splashing onto an empty mind. Already your consciousness moves within a structured field: you recognize the window and remember last night’s rain; you register the bird’s song with a faint feeling of calm; you recall what day it is and the tasks ahead. Even in these waking seconds, experience arrives layered with sensation, image, emotion, memory, and meaning interwoven.

At every instant, this field of experience is multi-layered. Take the simple smell of slow-poured coffee drifting from the kitchen: at one level you register a rich, earthy-sweet scent in the air (a purely sensory impression); simultaneously an image springs to mind of the dark, steaming cup waiting for you (your imagination at work); you feel a small wave of comfort and appetite (an affective response entwined with a conative desire to get that coffee); you may even find yourself thinking the word “coffee” and murmuring ah, breakfast (a linguistic and intellectual act that identifies and situates this sensation, already pointing you toward the act of pouring a cup). Even such a mundane moment is composed of stacked strata—sense, image, feeling, impulse, thought, and language—each adding its own tone and texture to what you consciously experience.

Experience never unfolds in isolation. Surrounding each of us is a social and cultural context that penetrates what and how we experience. The meaning of that morning coffee, for instance, is shaped by culture (perhaps it’s a cherished daily ritual, a symbol of morning calm shared by all true Seattleites) and by social circumstances (maybe your green-eyed, curly-haired wife prepared it for you, adding a layer of interpersonal warmth or obligation). Our practical routines themselves are embedded in a shared world: the language we use to label things and the common expectations we carry tell us, almost subconsciously, what to notice and what to ignore. Even our inner life has depths beyond immediate awareness—psychic undercurrents of habit, personality, and subconscious association that influence why one moment resonates and another passes quietly. All these layers—practical, social, cultural, and psychic—enfold each simple experience, giving it a richness we usually take for granted.

And still there are more elusive aspects of the given. Every experience contains what a philosopher might call an empirical residue: the sheer concrete “thisness” of reality that is presented to us without our understanding yet why it is so. This includes all the accidentals and specifics of here and now: the particular spot where your chair sits, the exact 5:42 AM on the clock as you sip your coffee, the fact that today’s brew is a touch stronger than yesterday’s. These details are simply given to your awareness—brute facts that no general insight fully explains, the backdrop against which understanding must work. Alongside these factual givens, we also experience absences—the felt gaps and missing pieces in the fabric of the moment. You might notice your cup is smaller than usual and sense that something is off, or you may feel the quiet where a friend’s morning greeting used to be. Such absences are as much a part of the experiential field as any positive sensation: they manifest as a nagging question, an empty chair, a hunger for something not there. An absence can tug at your attention—a sign that draws you toward what is lacking or not yet understood, urging inquiry.

In this way, experience spans a remarkable breadth. It ranges from raw sensations up through imagination and emotion to thought and language; from immediate bodily drives to practical plans and actions; from the private stream of consciousness to the social and cultural atmosphere we breathe; from the surface of awareness to the submerged psychic depths; from the solid presence of things to the intangibility of what isn’t there. All these layers together constitute the full range of what can be given to consciousness. Nothing we encounter in waking life is ever “pure” sensation or isolated fact; it arrives intertwined with these multiple dimensions, a complex, dynamic field in which our attention continuously moves.

Crucially, experience is not a passive recording of sensory inputs but an active and selective engagement. Our attention works like a roaming spotlight, highlighting some facets of the field and leaving others in shadow, guided by our intentions, habits, interests, and desires. Picture two people walking down the same street—one an architect, the other a gardener. The architect looks up and immediately notices the elegant curve of a roofline and the pattern of glass on a new building, while the gardener is looking down, drawn to the colors of wildflowers by the sidewalk and the health of the old oak trees along the road. Each person’s background and purpose emphasize certain aspects of the scene and all but ignore others. Their minds also weave in different associations: the architect automatically compares the building’s design to others she knows, perhaps sparking an idea for her own upcoming project, while the gardener recalls how those roses bloomed last year and mentally notes the dry soil around the oak’s roots. In effect, each is experiencing a different street, filtered and colored by a distinct pattern of interest. What we perceive is quietly shaped by what we are looking for (or hoping for, or afraid of) in that moment. The stream of sensations may be the same, but experience is the portion of that stream illuminated by the light of attention.

The dominant pattern of our attention can shift with circumstance or purpose. We might slip into an aesthetic pattern of experience, for instance, when we pause on our walk to admire a sunset: our gaze lingers on the sky’s colors and cloud forms for their sheer beauty, with no further goal in mind. Moments later, we may switch into a practical pattern as we remember an errand—now we’re scanning traffic and street signs, focused on getting somewhere efficiently. On another day, we could be in an intellectual pattern: imagine a scientist in her lab, eyes narrowed at an instrument readout, or a student poring over a puzzle; here the mind attends to data and ideas, every sense impression evaluated for what it might mean or how it fits into a theory. There are also times of a religious or spiritual pattern of consciousness, when we attend to the world with a sense of depth or sacred significance—for one person the morning bird’s song might be heard not just as a pretty sound but as a note of creation’s harmony, a reminder of something transcendent in the everyday. In each of these modes, certain layers of experience come to the fore while others fade into the background. The artist’s eye revels in sensory and imaginal richness, the busy commuter’s mind zeroes in on practical cues, the inquirer filters everything for clues to a truth, the spiritually attentive soul finds meaning even in a silence. We move among such patterns fluidly, often without realizing how our consciousness reorients to meet the moment’s needs or our heart’s aims.

Deep changes in ourselves can transform these patterns profoundly. Major shifts of outlook—conversions of mind and heart—reconfigure what we notice and value. Consider the effect of a moral conversion: a person awakens to a new concern for others or for justice, and suddenly aspects of experience once overlooked stand out sharply. The streets that seemed ordinary yesterday are now filled with evidence of inequity or suffering that demand attention. An intellectual conversion can likewise alter one’s whole orientation to experience: the day a formerly indifferent student falls in love with learning, the world starts to brim with questions—every phenomenon becomes something to inquire into, where before it was merely there. A religious conversion or profound shift in faith can flood even mundane experiences with new meaning, as when someone who has undergone a spiritual renewal begins to perceive purpose or providence in events that used to seem trivial or random. In each case, the fundamental pattern of attention shifts. What one attends to, how one interprets feelings and absences, what one finds significant—all these are transformed by a conversion. The field of experience itself is restructured because the chooser, the knower, the one who is experiencing, has changed at a fundamental level. New eyes, as the saying goes, create a new world to see.

In our current age, an increasingly large part of this structured field of experience is influenced by technology. Much of what we sense, imagine, and even feel is now mediated by devices and digital systems. Think of how a smartphone shapes a given afternoon: your friend’s face appears to you as a glowing image on a screen rather than in person; your sense of what’s happening in the world comes through a curated news feed; even your social interactions and cultural cues stream to you via an array of apps and algorithms. The flow of experience is being filtered and patterned by systems outside ourselves, often designed intentionally to capture our attention. A notification’s ping draws your eye, an algorithm decides which posts or products populate your view. In subtle but pervasive ways, technology directs the spotlight of our attention, highlighting certain stimuli and omitting others. Among these technologies, artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the most influential in structuring the texture of daily experience.

AI systems excel at detecting patterns and regularities in vast amounts of data and presenting those patterns back to us in some, ideally, useful form. They recommend music and movies, finish our sentences as we type, and guide us through traffic; they alert us when an out-of-the-ordinary charge shows up on our credit card, or when a seismic tremor begins half a world away. In doing so, they act as a kind of artificial attentiveness: tirelessly sifting through streams of information, picking out what we through our choices or the makers through their product design choices would deem noteworthy, and bringing it to our awareness. One might say these systems are told to “pay attention” on our behalf to things no single human could monitor alone. They extend the reach of our senses and our memory. A wearable device can keep track of subtle changes in our heartbeat and nudge us when something seems wrong, effectively heightening the bodily layer of experience. A search engine, armed with AI, can scour millions of documents in seconds and throw into our intellectual field of view facts and perspectives we might never have found on our own. In these ways, AI tools become new actors in the field of experience—not as conscious subjects, but as powerful shapers of what appears before our conscious selves.

Yet it is crucial to remember that, for all their sophistication, these machines do not themselves have insight. They pattern experience but do not ascend from experience to understanding in the way a human mind does. An AI can spot that you often listen to trance on Monday mornings and suggest a playlist—that is pattern recognition, drawn from experience. It cannot, however, share in the why of your Monday blues or joys; it doesn’t genuinely grasp the meaning of music lifting a mood. A language model can predict and produce an remarkably coherent paragraph on any topic, drawing on statistical patterns gleaned from human writing. But it has no actual wonder or curiosity about the topic, no moment of “Aha!” where it understands a truth. It is producing a facsimile of insight—sentences that look like the product of thought—without any actual act of understanding behind them. AI is empty of the kind of rational consciousness that gives human insight life, the affirmation of truth. In simple terms, an AI can rearrange and regurgitate the patterns it has detected, but it does not know what any of it truly means. The insight, the judgment, the felt realization of “So this is how it is!” never occurs in the silicon circuits; it occurs, if at all, in you as you reflect on the output.

In light of this, we can see that AI tools present patterns of experience to us, which is a very different thing. They generate images, words, and predictions that mimic the end-products of understanding, and those products can certainly feed into our understanding. A human reading a well-formulated answer from an AI might come to an insight or at least a good question to pursue. But the machine didn’t leap from perplexity to illumination; it didn’t have the perplexity in the first place. What it gives us are suggestions, simulations, arrangements of data. We remain the ones who must dive into the meaning, ask further pertinent questions, and discern truth from error. In a sense, the latest AI can offer us an abundance of ready-made “answers,” but without the context of a knowing subject behind them, they are answers awaiting a knower to truly make sense of them. We have, then, a kind of mirror: technology reflecting back patterns that originated in human experience, now arranged in novel ways. It falls to our intelligence to decide what to do with those patterns—whether they fit, whether they answer a real question, whether they spark a genuine insight and help us discover Being or lead us down a false trail.

Seen this way, the advent of AI is less about creating artificial minds than about amplifying and reorganizing the field of experience in which our own minds operate. This offers a tremendous opportunity: we can develop AI tools as forms of artificial attentiveness that help us attend more fully and finely to the world. Rather than try to skip over the hard work of inquiry—from data straight to statistically possible “conclusions”—we can use these tools to enrich the data, to illuminate the patterns, to keep track of the threads that our limited attention might lose. A well-designed AI system might function like a perceptual prosthetic, extending our natural capacities. It might scan medical images hour after hour without fatigue, so that a doctor’s attention is drawn unerringly to the faint shadow that could be an early tumor—augmenting the physician’s experienced eyes, not replacing them. It might handle the tedium of monitoring factory sensors or global weather updates, freeing human minds to do the interpreting once an anomaly is flagged. In creative pursuits, an AI might rapidly prototype variations of a design or a melody, not to outdo the artist’s imagination but to give it more raw material to work with, more vistas to explore. In all these roles, the technology does what it excels at—broad, tireless pattern processing—so that human beings can do what we excel at: grasping meaning, arriving at insights, making value judgments and novel connections. The ascent from data to understanding is still ours to climb, but now with better footholds and a safety net below.

Experience, as we’ve seen, is the fertile ground where every inquiry begins. It is the condition and the invitation for insight: only because something is given to us—something seen or heard or felt, something missed or longed for—do we begin to ask and understand. The more richly patterned and aptly focused that given is, the more likely we are to catch sight of the next illuminating idea. If we conceive of AI as a partner in shaping the given, as a means to broaden and sharpen our field of experience, then its value becomes clear. Such technology would not short-circuit the path from ignorance to knowledge; rather, it would light it better, remove a few stones, perhaps extend it into places we couldn’t reach before. It would help us ask better questions and find relevant data, but it would leave the questioning and the knowing—our distinctively human act—intact and truly ours.

Ultimately, the ascent of knowing remains a human journey. Understanding still must rise on the foundation of our own experience, our own insight, our own judgment. What our tools can do is support that foundation. They can widen the experiential field and sharpen our focus, but they cannot substitute for the spark of insight or the resolve of judgment. Their highest promise is to serve as artificial attentiveness—extending our gaze and heightening our awareness—so that in an ever more complex and patterned field of experience, the spark of human understanding has all the more to ignite it and room to soar.

Incantation

By Czesław Miłosz

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
It is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo‑Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo,
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit,
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.