creators_name: O'Brien, Gerard creators_name: Opie, Jon type: journalp datestamp: 2001-03-29 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:36 metadata_visibility: show title: The Disunity of Consciousness ispublished: pub subjects: cog-psy subjects: phil-mind full_text_status: public keywords: connectionism, philosophy of mind, phenomenal consciousness, single-track theory of consciousness, multi-track theory of consciousness abstract: 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. date: 1998 date_type: published publication: The Australasian Journal of Philosophy volume: 76 pagerange: 378-395 refereed: TRUE referencetext: Baars, B.J. 1988: A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Block, N. 1995: On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, 227-87. Churchland, P.M. 1995: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cytowic, R.E. 1993: The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Abacus. Crick, F. 1984: Function of the Thalamic Reticular Complex: The Searchlight Hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 81, 4586-4590. Dennett, D.C. 1991: Consciousness Explained. New York: Little, Brown. Dennett, D.C. 1993: The Message is: There is no Medium. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 53, 919- 31. Jackendoff, R. 1987: Consciousness and the Computational Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson-Laird, P.N. 1988: A Computational Analysis of Consciousness. In A.Marcel and E.Bisiach (eds), Consciousness in Contemporary Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.357-68. Mandler, G. 1975: Consciousness: Respectable, Useful and Probably Necessary. In R.Solso (ed) Information Processing and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp.229-54. Milner, A. and Rugg, M., eds. 1992: The Neuropsychology of Consciousness. Academic Press. Neisser, U. 1967: Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts. Newman, J. 1995: Thalamic Contributions to Attention and Consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition, 4, 172-193. O’Brien, G. and Opie, J. forthcoming: A Connectionist Theory of Phenomenal Experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Penrose, R. 1989: The Emperor’s New Mind. London: Penguin. Sacks, O. 1985: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. London: Picador. Sacks, O. 1995: An Anthropologist On Mars. London: Picador. Schacter, D. 1989: On the Relation Between Memory and Consciousness: Dissociable Interactions and Conscious Experience. In H.Roediger and F.Craik (eds), Varieties of Memory and Consciousness: Essays in Honour of Endel Tulving. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Shallice, T. 1988: Information-Processing Models of Consciousness: Possibilities and Problems. In A.Marcel and E.Bisiach (eds), Consciousness in Contemporary Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.305-33. Smythies, J.R. 1994: Requiem for the Identity Theory. Inquiry, 37, 311-29. Strawson, G. 1994: Mental Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zeki, S. 1993: A Vision of the Brain. Oxford: Blackwell. citation: O'Brien, Gerard and Opie, Jon (1998) The Disunity of Consciousness. [Journal (Paginated)] document_url: http://cogprints.org/1413/3/The_Disunity_of_Consciousness.pdf