- •I.1 Preliminary Remarks
- •I.2 Cases of Consciousness (or Its Absence)
- •I.3 Kinds of Consciousness
- •I.4 Kinds of Unity
- •Figure I.2
- •1.1 Multiple Experiences and the Problem of Unity
- •1.2 Undermining the Problem as Standardly Conceived
- •1.3 The One Experience View
- •1.4 An Account of Synchronic Phenomenal Unity
- •Figure 1.1
- •2.1 The Body Image
- •2.2 A Theory of Bodily Sensations
- •2.3 The Problem of Bodily Unity
- •3.1 Opening Remarks
- •3.2 Perceptual Consciousness and Experience of the Body
- •3.3 Unity and Conscious Thoughts
- •3.4 Unity and Felt Moods
- •4.1 Examples of Unity through Time
- •4.2 The Specious Present and the Problem of Diachronic Unity
- •4.3 An Account of Unity through Time
- •4.4 Some Mistakes, Historical and Contemporary
- •4.5 Carnap and the Stream of Consciousness
- •5.1 Results of Splitting the Brain
- •Figure 5.1
- •5.2 Multiple Personality Disorder, Split Brains, and Unconscious Automata
- •5.3 Indeterminacy in the Number of Persons
- •5.4 Disunified Access Consciousness
- •5.5 Disunified Phenomenal Consciousness: Two Alternatives
- •5.6 The Nontransitivity of Phenomenal Unity
- •6.1 The Ego Theory and the Bundle Theory Quickly Summarized
- •6.2 Objections to the Ego Theory
- •6.3 Objections to the Bundle Theory
- •6.4 A New Proposal
- •6.5 Problem cases
- •6.6 Vagueness in Personal Identity
- •Introduction
4.5 Carnap and the Stream of Consciousness
The view I have been defending is not entirely without historical antecedent. Rudolf Carnap in his book, The Logical Structure of the World (1967), held that entire streams of consciousness are the basic elements of experience.
According to Carnap, streams of consciousness are noncom- posite in that they lack individual experiences as parts. Carnap did not deny that we talk as if there are particular experiences within the overall stream, but he claimed that ontologically this talk is not perspicuous.
Carnap appears to have been motivated in part by the belief that "we have to proceed from that which is epistemically primary, that is to say, from the given, i.e., from experiences themselves in their totality and undivided unity" (1967, p. 67). In Carnap's view, prior to any learning, we are given only the entire streams. Subsequent categorizations then divide up the streams in various ways.
The present proposal is motivated not at all by claims of an epistemological sort about the learning process. The argument I have given is that the proposed view best accounts for the facts of unity at a time and unity through time. Nothing that we ordinarily say about experience needs to be given up. No large bullets need to be swallowed. The view is clear and simple; and it explains in a compelling way why the problems of unity for experience seem so intractable. Begin with the assumption that there are individual experiences somehow bundled together by a phenomenal unity relation to form an overarching experience and you will find yourself either supposing that phenomenal unity is something unique and basic about which you can say nothing else at all except that it bundles experiences together to form a unified consciousness, or you will join Hume in confessing that the problem of the unifying principle is too hard to be solved. The latter course of action at least has the virtue of candor, but the best strategy, it seems to me, is simply to give up the assumption.
Once the assumption is dropped, we have a straightforward explanation of why, contra Strawson, it seems so very natural to talk of our consciousness forming a stream. Streams of water begin and end. They are sometimes calm and smooth; at other times rough and turbulent. Streams of water flow. They do not contain within themselves other shorter streams. Nor do they divide into multiple constituent streams all of the same length as the streams containing them. See figure 4.7. So it is, I claim, with experience or consciousness. Consciousness forms a stream. It begins and ends. Its content is sometimes monotonous. At other times, it is rich and varied. Within consciousness, there is a phenomenal flow, revealed in its content. A stream of consciousness is just one temporally extended experience that represents a flow of things in the world. It has no shorter experiences as parts. Indeed it has no experiences as proper parts at all.
Figure 4.7
Streams are not as shown. They do not contain multiple constituent streams.
Split Brains