Abstract
This paper concerns the role that reference to subjects of experience can play in individuating streams of consciousness, and the relationship between the subjective and the objective structure of consciousness. A critique of Tim Bayne’s recent book indicates certain crucial choices that works on the unity of consciousness must make. If one identifies the subject of experience with something whose consciousness is necessarily unified, then one cannot offer an account of the objective structure of consciousness. Alternatively, identifying the subject of experience with an animal means forgoing the conceptual connection between being a subject of experience and having a single phenomenal perspective.
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Notes
Unless otherwise stated all references to Bayne are to his 2010.
In conversation he has acknowledged that he would be “less comfortable” with pluralism toward the token stream question.
I am unsure whether, when Bayne refers to my awareness of my experiences, he means this “awareness” cognitively or experientially; if he means it experientially, then if I had two simultaneous experiences with the same phenomenal character, then simply by being aware of that character, I would thereby be aware of two corresponding experiences—even if I did not know this.
The only reason Bayne is able to pursue, at all, the issue of how many streams of consciousness there are in the world, is because in Part II of the book he identifies subjects of experience with experiencing animals or organisms, and the identities of animals or organisms are objective. The significance of this move will be discussed in Sect. 5.
Although I will not discuss a psychological account of the token stream question, the version of the vehicular account I articulate in the next section may constitute such an account; see Shoemaker (1984).
Note that the phenomenalist tripartite account does have a certain appeal where the token experience question is concerned, perhaps because it appears to have no further ambitions than that of articulating the felt structure of experience. The organismic tripartite account brings the same resources to bear on the token experience question yet seems less satisfying, because it seems to have pretensions to capture something more.
If we accept the organismic tripartite, and don’t begin by ruling out the possibility of multiple streams of consciousness in one animal, then the most we can offer is a kind of disjunctive account: across animals, streams of consciousness are distinguished by their subject; within an animal, by their phenomenal character. I think one could provide a kind of causal/functional justification for this claim, but doing so would require a slightly different account of the identities of conscious tokens, one according to which what distinguishes streams of consciousness from each other is at a very deep level the same in all cases. See Sect. 5.
In his defense of an animalist account of the subject of experience, Snowdon concedes that we cannot imagine what it is like to be a subject with a disunified consciousness. But, he says, “this merely raises the question whether there has to be some way that it is like… when there is a single subject of experience” (1995, p. 78). He implies that there doesn’t, and if a subject of experience is just an animal, then I can’t see that he’s wrong.
Louise Richardson suggests that it is perhaps a-personal.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Louise Richardson and Tim Bayne for helpful comments on drafts of this paper.
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Schechter, E. The unity of consciousness: subjects and objectivity. Philos Stud 165, 671–692 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9970-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9970-z