 Kant’s reference to the necessary unity of apperception or self-consciousness in the quotation above means (at least) that the action of judging is the way our mind achieves self-consciousness. We must represent an objective world in order to distinguish ourselves from it, and we represent an objective world by judging that some representations necessarily belong together. Moreover, recall from  4.1  that, for Kant, we must have an a priori capacity to represent the world as law-governed, because “we can represent nothing as combined (or connected) in the object without having previously combined it ourselves” (B130). It follows that objective connections in the world cannot simply imprint themselves on our mind. Rather, experience of an objective world must be constructed by exercising an a priori capacity to judge, which Kant calls the faculty of understanding (A80–81/B106). The understanding constructs experience by providing the a priori rules, or the framework of necessary laws, in accordance with which we judge representations to be objective. These rules are the pure concepts of the understanding or categories, which are therefore conditions of self-consciousness, since they are rules for judging about an objective world, and self-consciousness requires that we distinguish ourselves from an objective world.