The Unity of Consciousness (Summary)

488 | book symposium The Unity of Consciousness By TIM BAYNE Oxford University Press, 2010. xii þ 342 pp. £55.00 cloth, £30.00 paper Summary TIM BAYNE The recent explosion of interest in consciousness has undoubtedly taught us much, but certain aspects of consciousness have not received the attention that they deserve. One such aspect is the unity of consciousness. The Unity of Consciousness has three central aims. The first aim is to provide an account of what the unity of consciousness consists in. What might it mean to say that consciousness is – or, as the case may be, is not – unified? The second aim of the volume is to determine whether consciousness is unified. Is consciousness necessarily unified, or are there conditions in which the unity of consciousness breaks down? The third aim of the volume is to explore the implications of the unity of consciousness. What might the unity of consciousness teach us about the nature of consciousness or the self? There are many facets of the unity of consciousness – indeed, we really ought to talk about the unities of consciousness. My focus is on phenomenal unity. Suppose that you are aware of a pain in your left leg and a loud Analysis Reviews Vol 74 | Number 3 | July 2014 | pp. 488–490 doi:10.1093/analys/anu054 ß The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Downloaded from http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Manchester on August 7, 2014 Runciman, W.G. 1966. Relative Deprivation and Social Justice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Temkin, L. 1987. Intransitivity and the mere addition paradox. Philosophy and Public Affairs 16: 138–87. Temkin, L. 1993. Harmful goods, harmless bads. In Value, Welfare, and Morality, eds. R.G. Frey and C. Morris, , 290–324. New York: Cambridge University Press. Temkin, L. 2000. Equality, priority, and the levelling down objection. In The Ideal of Equality, eds. M. Clayton and A. Williams, , 126–61. London/New York: Macmillan/ St. Martin’s Press. Temkin, L. 2003a. Egalitarianism defended. Ethics 113: 764–82. Temkin, L. 2003b. Personal versus impersonal principles: reconsidering the slogan. Theoria 69: 21–31. Temkin, L. 2011. Justice, equality, fairness, desert, rights, free will, responsibility, and luck. In Distributive Justice and Responsibility, eds. C. Knight and Z. Stemplowska, , 51–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varey, C. and D. Kahneman. 1992. Experiences extended across time: evaluation of moments and episodes. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 5: 169–85. book symposium | 489 Downloaded from http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Manchester on August 7, 2014 clanging sound. Any description of your total state of consciousness – any description of what it is like for you to be you – will need to advert to your experience of the sound and of the pain. Moreover, any description of your phenomenal perspective will need to capture the fact that you experience the sound and the pain ‘together’ – that these two experiences share a conjoint phenomenal character. We can describe experiences that share a conjoint phenomenal character as phenomenally unified with each other. With the notion of phenomenal unity in hand, we can ask what it is for an individual’s consciousness to be unified. Here we need a thesis that relates subjects of experience to experiences. One such thesis is what I call the ‘unity thesis’ (Bayne and Chalmers 2003). Roughly, the unity thesis is the claim that, necessarily, the simultaneous experiences of a single subject of experience will be mutually phenomenally unified with each other. In a sense, the unity thesis is more of a template than a fully determinate thesis, for it can be understood in a number of quite different ways depending on how ‘necessity’ is understood and on how subjects of experience are individuated. The version of the thesis on which I focus construes necessity in nomological terms (more on this in my response) and identifies subjects of experience with organisms. On this reading, the unity thesis is roughly equivalent to the claim that consciousness in us is restricted to a single stream at any one time. (The final chapter of the book explores a very different reading of the unity thesis, according to which it is not a substantive claim whose truth is to be evaluated in light of a pre-existing conception of the subject of experience but is instead an a priori constraint on the relationship between consciousness and subjects.) The unity thesis can be considered from both first-person and third-person perspectives. With respect to the first-person perspective, I argue that introspection provides us with reason to take the thesis seriously. Reflecting on one’s consciousness invariably reveals that one enjoys a single phenomenal state that subsumes each of the various experiences that one has at the time in question. (Of course, this appeal to introspection provides only a pro tanto consideration in favour of the unity thesis and there are many objections to it.) Third-person considerations provide important objections to the unity thesis, for a number of phenomena – most notably the split-brain syndrome – are often thought to show that consciousness can become disunified. I respond to such claims by suggesting that the appearance of conscious disunity can be explained away by supposing that subjects possess a single stream of consciousness that rapidly switches between two clusters of contentful states. The final third of the volume considers some possible implications of the unity of consciousness. I argue that the unity of consciousness provides a much-needed constraint on theories of consciousness. Following Searle 490 | book symposium University of Manchester Manchester, M13 9PL [email protected] References Bayne, T. and D. Chalmers. 2003. What is the unity of consciousness? In The Unity of Consciousness, ed. A. Cleeremans, , 23–58 Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. 2000. Consciousness. Annual Review of Neuroscience 23: 557–78. Downloaded from http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Manchester on August 7, 2014 (2000), we can distinguish between atomistic accounts of consciousness, which hold that the subject’s total conscious state is built up out of smaller, less-complex conscious states, and holistic accounts, which regard total conscious states as the fundamental units of consciousness. The unity thesis, if true, provides us with good reason to adopt a holistic conception of consciousness, for if consciousness was atomistic then we should expect there to be conditions in which the processes responsible for binding the various ‘building blocks’ of consciousness together are disrupted, with the result that the individual in question would have conscious states that are not phenomenally unified with each other. But if the unity thesis is correct, then there are no conditions that satisfy this description. (And even if there are contexts in which the unity of consciousness does break down, the nature of such breakdowns offers little support for atomism.) The Unity of Consciousness concludes with some reflections on the subject of experience (or self). There is, I suggest, something to the idea that the unity of consciousness is not a merely contingent feature of human experience but is instead metaphysically necessary. I argue that taking this intuition seriously requires recognizing a view of the self according to which selves are constructed out of experiences. I call the account that I develop here ‘virtual phenomenalism’, for it conceives of the self as a merely virtual entity that is brought into being by the self-representational structure of the stream of consciousness. Virtual phenomenalism preserves an essential connection between the subject of experience and the unity of consciousness: because the subject of experience is nothing but a phenomenal fiction generated by the self-representational structure of the phenomenal field, there is an a priori guarantee that the simultaneous experiences of a subject of experience must be phenomenally unified with each other. My claim is not that ‘virtual phenomenalism’ represents the only genuine conception of what it is to be a subject of experience, but that it represents one aspect – and, I suspect, a rather central aspect – of our self-conception.