Self-Consciousness and the Unity of Consciousness

Abstract

Consciousness has a number of puzzling features. One such feature is its unity: the experiences (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. A striking fact about these experiences is that they appear to be phenomenally unified. Take just two of them: 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 experience 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 various simpler experiences (seeing a 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 the members of a set of conscious states bear to each other when they have a complex phenomenology (see Bayne and Chalmers 2003; Dainton 2000; Hurley 19^8; Lockwood 1989). We can illuminate co-consciousness by contrasting it with other unity relations that experiences can enter into. One such relation is co-ownership: