%A Gerard O'Brien
%A Jon Opie
%J The Australasian Journal of Philosophy
%T The Disunity of Consciousness
%X 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.

%K connectionism, philosophy of mind, phenomenal consciousness, single-track theory of consciousness, multi-track theory of consciousness
%P 378-395
%V 76
%D 1998
%L cogprints1413

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