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  -

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