Friedrich August von Hayek, Contributions to a Theory of How Consciousness Develops

Hayek’s manuscript essay, completed in September 1920 and presented here in its 2017 English translation, proposes a physiological explanation of consciousness through the development of connections among nerve cells. Its two sections move from a critique of supposedly elementary sensations to implications for association, attention, action, emotion, and abstraction. The central claim is that sensory qualities are neither intrinsic properties of individual neural impulses nor irreducible psychic elements. They emerge from an impulse’s position within a network shaped by experience. Consciousness must therefore be explained developmentally: the relationships that make an impression meaningful must themselves have been formed.

The first section attacks psychophysical parallelism for placing an unexplained conversion between neural excitation and sensation. Assigning each physiological event a corresponding psychic element merely restates the problem. Hayek instead defines becoming conscious as entering an existing organization of meanings:

We are therefore justified in saying that becoming conscious means integrating an impression into a preexisting nexus of meanings, a system of qualities, and it is this process that we shall designate as uptake into consciousness [Wertung or Auffassung].

“Uptake” connects an impression both to earlier impressions and to possible actions. Its physiological basis is facilitation: simultaneous excitation establishes connections through which subsequent excitation of one cell activates others. Because stimuli arrive together, each cell acquires a distinctive network of connections. The associated elements constitute its “field of uptake”; their activation gives the initiating impulse its qualitative character. Hayek’s telephone-switchboard analogy makes the argument concrete: a line’s significance lies in the characteristic constellation of other connections it reactivates, not in an isolated property of the line.

This account reverses the conventional relationship between sensation and memory. Physiological connections do not merely preserve experiences that were already conscious; they enable impulses to become conscious in the first place.

The connections between the physiological elements are thus the primary phenomenon that creates the mental phenomena.

Hayek accordingly rejects the need for a separate memory cell recording each impression. Experience establishes and modifies relationships, while recollection reactivates an impulse strongly enough to engage its field of uptake. He distinguishes the activation of existing connections from the formation or reinforcement of connections that will shape subsequent apprehension. Every conscious encounter consequently depends on the past while potentially altering the conditions of future consciousness.

Even sensory quality and localization are acquired relationally. Stimuli of similar origin repeatedly occur together, as do stimuli reaching neighboring receptors; these regularities establish overlapping orders of similarity and proximity. Movement, cross-sensory connections, and internal bodily reactions further differentiate impressions. An impulse can therefore remain unconscious or acquire a changed quality depending on its connections and the organism’s current condition. The critique of psychic atomism culminates in a concise formulation:

This relative theory of sensations stipulates instead that the quality of consciousness arises from the relations of the stimulus to other stimuli.

The second section asks how this widely interconnected system produces a definite sequence of thoughts rather than indiscriminate activation. Hayek replaces the isolated stimulus with the total impression and the brain’s preexisting state of arousal. Simultaneous inputs, ongoing thoughts, and bodily conditions activate overlapping fields; converging pathways reinforce certain elements sufficiently for them to become conscious. Selection thus arises from the joint effects of many processes. Context can complete an imperfect impression correctly, but it can also produce misreading or mishearing by favoring an anticipated meaning. Association experiments become questionable when they attribute a response to one stimulus while leaving these surrounding determinants unspecified.

Attention is anticipatory activation of a relevant field of uptake. Recognition adds connections to an earlier experiential context, while forgotten experiences can continue to shape understanding without returning as explicit memories. Hayek distinguishes knowledge as firmly established associations from understanding as the joint operation of more extensive relational resources. The same framework extends to individuality:

The totality of these linkages, which determine the quality of each impression and the reaction it evokes, constitutes each individual’s self, determines his being, his character.

Action is consequently mediated by the whole historically formed individual, rather than mechanically attached to an external impression. Hayek treats freedom of will as acting through one’s own nature and memory, not as exemption from determination.

Emotion and abstraction supply further applications. Revising James’s account, Hayek argues that bodily resonance contributes emotional quality without necessarily becoming directly conscious itself. Different impressions can share a reaction network and thereby acquire generalized content. Concepts similarly arise when otherwise different constellations share components of their uptake fields. Emotions depend chiefly on inherited reaction linkages, whereas conceptual reactions are individually acquired or mediated through language.

The concluding developmental account requires central integration, while acknowledging that actual organisms begin with inherited pathways rather than wholly unconnected nervous systems. Hayek offers a theoretical schema, not a detailed reconstruction of every mental trajectory. Its epistemological significance lies in combining radical experiential origins with constraints on subsequent experience: acquired relationships organize everything later apprehended and thus possess an “aprioristic character.” Yet those constraints do not justify identifying the mind’s order with the totality of existence. The essay’s decisive move is to explain sensation and thought through one relational process while denying that the resulting, limited organization of consciousness exhausts the world it encounters.