According to the Phenomenal Unity Thesis (“PUT”) – most prominently defended by Tim Bayne and David Chalmers – necessarily, any set of phenomenal states of a subject at a time is phenomenally unified. The standard formulation of this thesis is unacceptably vague because it does not specify what it is to be a subject. In this paper, I first consider possible meanings for ‘subject’ as used in PUT and argue that every plausible candidate definition renders the thesis trivially true. I (...) consider and reject Tim Bayne’s proposal that ‘subject’ means ‘human being’. Then I argue, contra Bayne and Chalmers, that PUT is not incompatible with any major theory of consciousness, and contra Michael Tye, that split-brain patients do not provide evidence against PUT. I close by considering some nontrivial alternatives to PUT. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that a capacity for mindreading conceived along the line of simulation theory provides the cognitive basis for forming we-centric representations of actions and goals. This explains the plural first personal stance displayed by we-intentions in terms of the underlying cognitive processes performed by individual minds, while preserving the idea that they cannot be analyzed in terms of individual intentional states. The implication for social ontology is that this makes sense of the plural subjectivity of joint (...) actions without making group agents require either a corporate body or the unity of consciousness. (shrink)