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Stefan Vereen's avatar

Thanks for opening up this question of unity as it pertains to our conscious experience. I read this article a few days ago and walked away with some unidentified frustration. After reflection, I can contribute three main points as soft-rebuttals.

First, I think the notion of attention/focus deserves more consideration and it would help fill in the question of “degrees of consciousness”. I think it’s through our faculty of attending that we have the feeling/experience of unity. There is mention of sensation and awareness but more should be said on this point.

Second, while the brain is certainly more malleable and capacious than we’ve once thought, does it really make sense to say the brain is loosely integrated? Trillions of synaptic connections, contra-laterality, topographical relationship (cortical homunculus), as well as the inhibitory functions of the hemispheres, gives us an indication of an evolutionary inheritance that is integrated at the level of electrical current and chemical reaction. We refer to the brain as a unit for good reason, in my opinion.

Third, psychopathology should make more of an appearance here and it would help give us reference to what disunity looks and sounds like in so far as we have uncovered the workings of the mind and the ways it can fail to achieve balance, well-being etc. I think we can do this without being overly prescriptive or normalizing.

The arguments presented here ultimately do little to undermine my direct experience. Actually, I think introspection does the muddling you claim it undoes. It’s our reflective capacities, strongly influenced by language, that encourages us to dissect, categorize and delimit. When I reflect on even the smallest tasks, I can systematize and describe various parts of that activity…but when I am lost in the task at hand, the self disappears…if unity of consciousness means anything, I believe it is found in these states of flow and immersion that are disturbed by introspection.

I look forward to reading more of your work and am happy to be part of the conversation!

Best to you, professor!

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St. Jerome Powell's avatar

It seems that while you argue well that it’s hard to introspectively prove that consciousness *is* unified, since introspection itself seems to have some unifying tendency, conversely if you could have an introspection of a *dis*unified phenomenology that would be more convincing evidence that consciousness really isn’t generally unified. If we grant this then this seems like an opportunity to get testamentary evidence from skilled meditators. I am not a particularly skilled meditator but my understanding is that most of them find that under sufficiently careful attention one finds that there is “no self”, ie the central unifying process we imagine ourselves to have, or even to be, does not in fact exist. So I think the claim here is probably right. I wonder how much opportunity for collaborations between analytic philosophers and meditators of this kind there is; it seems like a missed opportunity sometimes when the philosopher proposes a model of mind mainly out of abstract thought, with some untrained attempts at support from introspection, when there is are so many long and deep traditions of trained introspection.

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