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- Timothy J. Bayne (2004). Self-Consciousness and the Unity of Consciousness. The Monist 87 (2):219-236.Consciousness has a number of puzzling features. One such feature is its unity: the experiences and other conscious states that one has at a particular time seem to occur together in a certain way. I am currently enjoying visual experiences of my computer screen, auditory experiences of bird-song, olfactory experiences of coffee, and tactile experiences of feeling the ground beneath my feet. Conjoined with these perceptual experiences are proprioceptive experiences, experiences of agency, affective and emotional experiences, and conscious thoughts of various kinds. These experiences are unified in a variety of ways, but the kind of unity that I’m interested in here concerns their phenomenal character. Take just two of these experiences: the sound of bird-song and the smell of coffee. There is something it is like to have the auditory experience, there is something it is like to have the olfactory experience, and there is something it is like to have both the auditory and olfactory experiences together. These two experiences occur as parts or components or aspects of a larger, more complex experience. And what holds of these two experiences seems to hold – at least in normal contexts – of all of one’s simultaneous experiences: they seem to be subsumed by a single, maximal experience.2 We could think of this maximal experience as an experiential perspective on the world. What it is like to be me right now is (or involves) an extremely complex conscious state that subsumes the various simpler experiences that I outlined above (seeing my computer screen, hearing bird-song, smelling coffee, and so on). I will follow recent literature in using the term “co-consciousness” for the relation that a set of conscious states bear to each other when they have a complex phenomenology (Bayne and Chalmers 2003; Dainton 2000; Hurley 1998; Lockwood 1989).Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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If consciousness has no influence on my behaviour,what shall I do with it ? In this paper it is contended, that even if neuroscience is right, if some conscious experiences such as emotional experiences have no influence on our behavior, they still constitute a significant part of our world, our existence. For understanding the significance of conscious experiences we should go beyond behaviour, biology and biological evolution. This paper and its understanding of consciousness and natural science is based on an idealist philosophy maintaining, that only conscious experience is real. Conscious experience is supposed to be known directly or intuitively, it cannot be explained. Key words: Consciousness as existence; behaviour; communication; language; free will; idealist philosophy; collective conscious experience; cognition.
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| | Other links: cogprints.org | Scholar | More options ... theorists insist that consciousness is essentially unified. Other theorists assert that the unity of consciousness is an illusion, and that consciousness is often, if not invariably, disunified. Unfortunately, it is rare for proponents of either side of the debate to explain what the unity of consciousness might involve. What would it mean for consciousness to be unified? In this chapter I provide a brief cartography of the unity of consciousness. In the next section I introduce a number of unity relations that can hold between conscious states, and in the following sections I show how these unity relations can be used to construct various conceptions of the unity of consciousness—what I call unity theses. These unity theses provide us with a set of reference points by means of which we can orient discussions of the (dis)unity of consciousness.
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| | Scholar | More options ... In Consciousness and persons, Michael Tye (Tye, M. (2003). Consciousness and persons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.) develops and defends a novel approach to the unity of consciousness. Rather than thinking of the unity of consciousness as involving phenomenal relations between distinct experiences, as standard accounts do, Tye argues that we should regard the unity of consciousness as involving relations between the contents of consciousness. Having developed an account of what it is for consciousness to be unified, Tye goes on to apply his account of the unity of consciousness to the split-brain syndrome. I provide a critical evaluation of Tye's account of the unity of consciousness and the split-brain syndrome.
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| | Other links: informaworld.com tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... As I see it, the science of consciousness is all about relating _third-person data_ - about brain processes, behavior, environmental interaction, and the like - to _first-person data_ about conscious experience. I take it for granted that there are first-person data. It's a manifest fact about our minds that there is something it is like to be us - that we have subjective experiences - and that these subjective experiences are quite different at different times. Our direct knowledge of subjective experiences stems from our first-person access to them. And subjective experiences are arguably the central data that we want a science of consciousness to explain.
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| | Other links: u.arizona.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In Consciousness and persons, Michael Tye (Tye, M. (2003). Consciousness and persons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.) develops and defends a novel approach to the unity of consciousness. Rather than thinking of the unity of consciousness as involving phenomenal relations between distinct experiences, as standard accounts do, Tye argues that we should regard the unity of consciousness as involving relations between the contents of consciousness. Having developed an account of what it is for consciousness to be unified, Tye goes on to apply his account of the unity of consciousness to the split-brain syndrome. I provide a critical evaluation of Tye's account of the unity of consciousness and the split-brain syndrome.
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| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: taylorandfrancis.metapress.com informaworld.com ingentaconnect.com philosophy.ox.ac.uk tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: taylorandfrancis.metapress.com informaworld.com ingentaconnect.com philosophy.ox.ac.uk tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The question of the possibility of conscious experience in animals has had a rebirth recentIy in both philosophy and psychology. I argue that there is an account of consciousness that is perfectly consistent with many animals enjoying conscious experiences. In defending my thesis, I examine a recent account of consciousness by Peter Carruthers which denies animals conscious experiences. I argue that Carruthers’ account should be rejected on the grounds that it is unnecessarily complex, and that it fails to provide either a sufficient or a necessary condition for conscious experience. A better account of consciousness, I maintain, is an Armstrongian account. I defend this account against a number of objections, and go on to show how it is consistent with a wide range of animals enjoying conscious experiences.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Human consciousness usually displays a striking unity. When one experiences a noise and, say, a pain, one is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain. One is conscious of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single conscious experience. Since at least the time of Immanuel Kant (1781/7), this phenomenon has been called the unity of consciousness . More generally, it is consciousness not of A and, separately, of B and, separately, of C, but of A-and-B- and-C together, as the contents of a single conscious state.
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| | Other links: data.cstr.ed.ac.uk books.google.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A general definition of consciousness that accommodates most views (Vimal, 2010b) is: “
‘consciousness is a mental aspect of a system or a process, which is a conscious experience, a
conscious function, or both depending on the context and particular bias (e.g. metaphysical
assumptions)’, where experiences can be conscious experiences and/or non-conscious experiences
and functions can be conscious functions and/or non-conscious functions that include qualities of
objects. These are a posteriori definitions because they are based on observations and the
categorization.” Non-conscious experiences are equivalent to relevant proto-experiences and nonconscious functions are equivalent to related proto-functions at various levels as these terms are
precursors of respective conscious subjective experiences and conscious functions aspect of
consciousness. The non-conscious experiences and non-conscious functions may be considered as a
part of the definition of mind and/or awareness.
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| | Other links: jcer.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The crux of this book is expressed in one short sentence from the Preface: 'Unity is a fundamental part of our experience, something that is crucial to its phenomenology' [p.xii], and the crux of this sentence is that the unity of consciousness is not a matter of phenomenal relations existing between distinct experiences – the received view [p.17], but the existence of relations between the contents of experiences – the one experience view [p.25ff]. In its simplest form Tye's claim is that: all our conscious states, whether visual, auditory, olfactory, tactual or gustatory, whether imagistic or emotional are experienced concurrently; they 'are phenomenologically unified ... [and] ... Phenomenological unity is a relation between qualities represented in experience, not between qualities of experiences. [p.36].
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness.
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| | Other links: consc.net u.arizona.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Timothy J. Bayne, Self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness
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