TY - GEN ID - cogprints1413 UR - http://cogprints.org/1413/ A1 - O'Brien, Gerard A1 - Opie, Jon Y1 - 1998/// N2 - It is commonplace for both philosophers and cognitive scientists to express their allegiance to the "unity of consciousness". This is the claim that a subject’s phenomenal consciousness, at any one moment in time, is a single thing. This view has had a major influence on computational theories of consciousness. In particular, what we call single-track theories dominate the literature, theories which contend that our conscious experience is the result of a single consciousness-making process or mechanism in the brain. We argue that the orthodox view is quite wrong: phenomenal experience is not a unity, in the sense of being a single thing at each instant. It is a multiplicity, an aggregate of phenomenal elements, each of which is the product of a distinct consciousness-making mechanism in the brain. Consequently, cognitive science is in need of a multi-track theory of consciousness; a computational model that acknowledges both the manifold nature of experience, and its distributed neural basis. KW - connectionism KW - philosophy of mind KW - phenomenal consciousness KW - single-track theory of consciousness KW - multi-track theory of consciousness TI - The Disunity of Consciousness SP - 378 AV - public EP - 395 ER -