title: The Disunity of Consciousness creator: O'Brien, Gerard creator: Opie, Jon subject: Cognitive Psychology subject: Philosophy of Mind description: 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 type: Journal (Paginated) type: PeerReviewed format: application/pdf identifier: http://cogprints.org/1413/3/The_Disunity_of_Consciousness.pdf identifier: O'Brien, Gerard and Opie, Jon (1998) The Disunity of Consciousness. [Journal (Paginated)] relation: http://cogprints.org/1413/