Let me drop my guess here for what it may be worth...
The angloamerican science or theory of phenomenology as posited by pragmatists like Peirce has some interesting points that may be worth considering, because they seem relevant to this discussion. Pragmatism holds that occurring perceptions alone perhaps cannot account for our understanding of the world. Some mental ability therefore must exist in mind before the act of perception occurs or finishes. That ability it holds may simply be an inclined trait. For me, the mind likely has a dispositional tendency to organize perceptions, which evolving bent is the result of repeated conduct. The innate inborn structure to instinctively accommodate our perceptions is thus merely a leaning. The creative agent of this fated design is a sheer habit of action. This implies that in the evolution of humanity an intelligent mind came before perception, because a dumb brute brain or a nonhuman mind lacks the ability to take in perceptions without such a preexisting intellectual ability. Pragmatism posits that the percipient feels it senses the seeming phenomenal haze of likely phenomenal stuff. The haze is a sign that represents the stuff. The psyche cannot access stuff directly, so must engage hazy signs to represent that probable stuff. The percipient observes what it feels it senses, and then expresses this finding to others similarly engaged, so that a tentative consensus of opinion might be agreed on by experts in the field. All that the individual and communal psyche can do is make a good guess at the stuff the haze stands for. The psyche however is phenomenal and not epiphenomenal. The brain or mind cannot generate its own inner images and ideas or notions and associations alone without the prior sense of objective phenomena that it stores in memory. There is no deep epiphenomenal system in the far reaches of the psyche that signs mystically signify. Rather, the psyche is the phenomenal stuff of moderating signs. Pragmatists hold that a raw involuntary feeling for haze is pure consciousness in the psyche, and without any reason to be so. Just exactly what feeling might be that consciousness could bear it without cause is still vague to me. If information is what signs bear, then information is perhaps the stuff that precedes hazy signs. If feeling is what consciousness bears, then perhaps feeling permeates and precedes everything else in the world. Mike wrote... Boris: Then let me switch to Kant. One of Kant's greatest contributions, IMHO, was to show that perceptions alone cannot account for our understanding of the world; we need to have some kind of per-existing structure with which to order what we perceive. Science has corroborated Kant's insight. We may perceive a gray shape traverse our field of vision, but we end up "seeing" a "car". There is a considerable amount of cognitive processing which has to occur between the moving gray shape and the car. It is unclear to me whether a person can have a "raw perception", i.e. an unprocessed mental perceptual experience. I suspect that like Chomsky's innate grammar, we also have an innate structure to accommodate our perceptions. And so, while I question whether the term "communication" appropriately applies to this process, I would agree that perceptions are only potential mental states and that they must pass through an unconscious translation or interpretive process before they reach awareness. I believe that some of the unconscious interpretive process is innate and some is learned. To the extent that both the perceptions and the ultimate awareness take place in the same mind/body, the claim that mental states are at least metaphorically the result of communication within an individual, albeit, passive, appears to be rational.
