Abstract: The startling empirical data that concern us here are well known. Severing the corpus callosum produces a kind of mental bifurcation (Sperry 1968). In one experiment, a garlic smell is presented to a patient’s right nostril. When asked to point with her left hand to

Abstract: As philosophical topics go, self-deception has something for everyone. It raises basic questions about the nature of belief and the relation of belief to thought, desire, and the will. It provokes further questions on such topics as reasoning, attention, self-knowledge, the unity of the self, intentional action, motivation, self-esteem, psychic defenses, the unconscious, personal character, and interpersonal relations. There are two basic questions about self-deception itself, which each take a familiar philosophical form: What is it? How is it possible? These questions have both an analytic and a psychological side. Is self-deception, as its name suggests, literally a case of lying to oneself? If not, how different can it be from other-deception and still deserve its name? Psychologically, what processes does self-deception involve and how is it motivated?

Abstract: Suppose someone hears a loud noise and at the same time sees a yellow flash. It seems hard to deny that the person can experience loudness and yellowness together. However, since loudness is experienced by the auditory sense whereas yellowness is experienced by the visual sense it also seems hard to explain how – given the difference between the senses – loudness and yellowness could possibly be experienced together. What is the solution to this problem? I start with some short remarks about what is not the problem (Section 2) and continue to argue that, given one sense of “experiencing two qualities together”, there is no philosophical problem at all (Section 3). An objection against this (Section 4) says that all this only concerns one kind of consciousness, “access consciousness”, while what is relevant here is a different kind of consciousness, namely “phenomenal consciousness”. I answer this objection by presenting another aspect of the unity of consciousness (Section 5). This case raises puzzling further questions (Section 6) but it can help to answer the objection presented in Section 4. I will end with some brief general speculation in a Kantian spirit (Section 7). The main upshot of this paper is a deflationary one: Where we thought to be confronted with a serious philosophical problem there really is none. What will emerge through the argument is a graded and functional view of the unity of consciousness

Abstract: 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

Abstract: I am in virtually complete sympathy with Galen Strawson's conclusions in 'The Self'. He takes a careful, measured approach to a topic that lends itself all too easily to speculation and intellectual extravaganzas. The results he achieves are for the most part balanced and plausible. I even have a lot of sympathy with his claim that a memory-produced sense of continuity across time is less central to selfhood than many philosophers think, though I will argue that he goes too far in the opposite direction

Abstract: Though there has been a huge resurgence of interest in consciousness in the past decade, little attention has been paid to what the philosopher Immanuel Kant and others call the unity of consciousness. The unity of consciousness takes different forms, as we will see, but the general idea is that each of us is aware of many things in the world at the same time, and often many of one's own mental states and of oneself as their single common subject, too

Abstract: Meehan finds fault with a number of my arguments, and proposes that better solutions to the problems I was addressing are available if we adopt a higher-order theory of consciousness. I start with some general remarks on theories of this sort. I connect what I had to say about the A-thesis with different forms of higher-order sense theories, and explain why I ignored higher-order thought theories altogether: there are compelling grounds for thinking they cannot provide a viable account of phenomenal unity in phenomenal terms. Meehan’s own account confirms this verdict. I then turn to phenomenal space. Although Meehan agrees that spatial accounts of co-consciousness are flawed, he formulates a number of interesting criticisms of the thought-experiment I employed in an attempt to show as much. However, he misconstrues my argument, taking it to concern a subject’s seeming to be in two places at once, rather than a subject’s having two spatially unconnected sense-fields. In an attempt to clarify the situation, I distinguish three different modes of self-location: subjective, sensory and material, each of which comes in two guises. I close with some remarks on the projectivist account of perception, and Meehan’s proposed alternative

Abstract: That our ordinary everyday experience exhibits both unity and continuity is uncontroversial, and on the face of it utterly unmysterious. At any moment we have some conscious awareness of both the world about us, as revealed through our perceptual experiences, and our own inner states – our bodily sensations, thoughts, mental images and so on. Since once wakened we tend to stay awake for several hours, tracing out continuous routes through whatever environment we happen to find ourselves in, it is hardly surprising that our experience itself is continuous rather than discontinuous

Abstract: Gilmore concentrates on two arguments which I took to undermine the claim that introspectibility is necessary for co-consciousness: the “shrub” argument, to the effect that there are necessary limits on what is introspectible, and the “headache” argument, which leads to the conclusion that some experiences are not introspectible at all. While agreeing that the versions of these arguments that Gilmore discusses do not succeed, I argue that the versions I put forward are largely untouched by his criticisms. Nonetheless, these criticisms shed very useful light on this whole area; likewise the distinctions Gilmore draws between different forms of introspectibility, which I discuss before getting down to the main business. I conclude with some comments on the split-brain argument that Gilmore uses to undermine the claim that introspectibility is sufficient for co- consciousness

Abstract: While agreeing with me on many issues, Revonsuo rejects my claim that phenomenal states could be co-conscious without being spatially related (in experience). In defence of my claim I described a thought-experiment in which — I argued — it is reasonable to suppose a subject’s overall consciousness would divide into two spatially unconnected sense-fields. Extrapolating from the consequences of binocular rivalry, Revonsuo suggests that the envisaged subject would experience either a single merged sense-field, or an alternation of unmerged fields. In response, I argue that the extrapolation is unwarranted. There is no reason to suppose alternation would occur, and while a single merged field might be experienced, this is likely to be a temporary or intermittent phenomenon — I offer further variants of the original case in support of this claim, along with some thoughts on the import of imaginability, and the varieties of phenomenal space. I then offer some critical considerations concerning “unified field theories” of consciousness, and conclude with some remarks on the relationship between phenomenology and explanation

Abstract: Virtually every aspect of the current philosophical discussion of self-deception is a matter of controversy including its definition and paradigmatic cases. We may say generally, however, that self-deception is the acquisition and maintenance of a belief (or, at least, the avowal of that belief) in the face of strong evidence to the contrary motivated by desires or emotions favoring the acquisition and retention of that belief. Beyond this, philosophers divide over whether this action is intentional or not, whether self-deceivers recognize the belief being acquired is unwarranted on the available evidence, whether self-deceivers are morally responsible for their self-deception, and whether self-deception is morally problematic (and if it is in what ways and under what circumstances). The discussion of self-deception and its associated puzzles gives us insight into the ways in which motivation affects belief acquisition and retention. And yet insofar as self-deception represents an obstacle to self-knowledge, which has potentially serious moral implications, self-deception is more than an interesting philosophical puzzle. It is a problem of particular concern for moral development, since self-deception can make us strangers to ourselves and blind to our own moral failings

Abstract: We perceive colour, shape, sound and touch 'bound together' in a single experience. The following arguments about this binding phenomenon are raised: (1) The individual signals passing from neurone to neurone are not bound together, whether as elements of information or physically. (2) Within a single cell, binding in terms of bringing together of information is potentially feasible. A physical substrate may also be available. (3) It is therefore proposed that a bound conscious experience must be a property of an individual cell, not of a group of cells. Since it is unlikely that one specific neurone is conscious, it is suggested that every neurone has a version of our consciousness, or at least some form of sentience. However absurd this may seem it appears to be consistent with the available evidence; arguably the only explanation that is. It probably does not alter the way we should expect to experience the world, but may help to explain the ways we seem to differ from digital computers and some of the paradoxes seen in mental illness. It predicts non-digital features of intracellular computation, for which there is already evidence, and which should be open to further experimental exploration. The arguments given may well prove flawed or the conclusion biologically or physically untenable, but the idea is raised for discussion not least because a formal demonstration that it is invalid may help to identify more fruitful avenues

Abstract: Co-consciousness is constituted by introspectibility: experiences are co-conscious [i.e., experienced together] because they are introspected or introspectible. A group of token experiences are co-conscious if and only if they are either the actual or potential objects of a single introspective awareness (2000: 35, Dainton's emphasis)

Abstract: What unites the many selves that constitute the human mind? How is the self-binding problem solved? I argue that separate selves come to belong together as one Self as a result of their dynamic participation in creating a single life, rather as the members of an orchestra come to belong together as a result of their jointly creating a single work of music

Abstract: Consciousness has been defined as that annoying period between naps, and this grumpy definition may not be wholly facetious, if Michael Tye's latest book is right. Tye's main goal here is to develop a theory of the phenomenal unity of experience at a time, and its diachronic analog, the moment-to-moment continuity of one's experiential stream from the time one wakes up to the time consciousness lapses

Abstract: Both Kant and Davidson view the existence of mental states, and so the possibility of mental content, as dependent on the obtaining of a certain unity among such states. And the unity at issue seems also to be tied, in the case of both thinkers, to a form of self-reflexivity. No appeal to self-reflexivity, however, can be adequate to explain the unity of consciousness that is necessary for the possibility of content- it merely shifts the focus of the question from the unity of consciousness in general to the unity of self-reflexivity in particular. Through a comparison of the views of Kant and Davidson on these matters, the nature of the unity of consciousness is explored, in relation to both the idea of the unity of the self and the unity that would seem to be required for the possibility of content. These forms of unity are seen to be indeed connected, and to be grounded, in Davidson and perhaps also in Kant, in organized, oriented, embodied activity

Abstract: There are researchers in cognitive science whouse clinical and experimental evidence to drawsome rather skeptical conclusions about acentral feature of our conscious experience,its unity. They maintain that the examinationof clinical phenomena reveals that humanconsciousness has a much more fragmentarycharacter than the one we normally attribute toit. In the article, these claims are questionedby examining some of the clinical studies onthe deficit of anosognosia. I try to show thatthese studies support a moderate sense of theunity of reflexive consciousness