Consciousness Does Not Flow: It Pulses — On the Myth of Continuity

Abstract

This article challenges the representation of consciousness as a continuous flow and proposes, instead, that it be understood as an intermittent manifestation: an emergent phenomenon articulated in pulses under specific neurobiological, narrative, and social conditions. Drawing on physics and mathematics, it questions the reification of the continuum as an unquestioned ontological horizon; drawing on neuroscience, both global broadcast models and findings concerning micro-interruptions of attention — among them, the attentional blink — suggest that conscious experience does not take the form of a homogeneous stream, but rather of a discontinuous composition. Contemporary philosophy — from the multiple-drafts model to neurophenomenology — in turn displaces the notion of the “self” as substance, recasting it instead as a functional model and a narrative construction. It follows that identity and freedom can no longer be grounded in the supposition of a persistent soul, but must instead be conceived as practices of memory, deliberation, and care, sustained by symbolic frameworks and shared institutions. Far from impoverishing our understanding of the human, this perspective renders it more exacting and more lucid: it replaces the metaphysical promise of permanence with a secular, finite, and responsible ethics of intermittence. The guiding thesis of these pages may thus be stated with sober radicality: consciousness does not flow; it pulses.