Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Phenomenal unity — the unity of experience — what makes simultaneous experiences one subject’s, and how a self-model or a perspective binds them. One of four unities kept apart (group: philosophy; ADR-024).
14 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-190 v2 | The coherent and fluent mind: how unified consciousness is constructed from cross-modal inputs via integrated processing experiences | Winkielman et al. (2015), DOI-10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00083. An opinion piece proposing an extra route to the unity of consciousness across the senses. Different modalities feed one global, content-nonspecific experience of processing quality (fluency, familiarity, coherence), and this integrated feeling then enters decisions about its source and relevance. The main support is the authors’ own finding (Ziembowicz et al. 2013; three experiments) that coherent but unrelated background patterns in one modality made targets in another modality be judged more “regular”, “familiar” and “possible”. The authors state that direct evidence is still needed that such effects run through changed experience and that its integration is causal (p. 2). | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-146); a promising, explicitly unproven hypothesis. It would be settled by showing, inside the cross-modal coherence paradigm itself, that the effect depends on an experienced feeling: for example, that it disappears when participants are led to attribute their sense of coherence to the background (the discounting manipulation the authors cite from other paradigms), and that reports of felt coherence mediate the judgement shift. |
| LIT-395 | The Combination Problem for Panpsychism | Chalmers (2016/2017), in Brüntrup & Jaskolla (eds), Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, OUP, pp. 179–214. How could micro-experiences constitute a macro-subject? The problem splits into subject, quality and structure versions; each yields an argument against constitutive (Russellian) panpsychism, of which the subject-summing and structural mismatch arguments are the strongest. Emergent, autonomous and identity panpsychism avoid combination at a cost in mental causation or physics. Phenomenal bonding, quantum holism, small palettes and informational composition are judged most worth pursuing. No solution is offered. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-358), from the author’s posted draft, not the published chapter; worth reading as the map of the combination problem: it splits the problem into subject, quality and structure versions (plus unity, boundary, awareness and grain), turns each into an argument, and sorts every response into emergent, autonomous, identity or combinatorial panpsychism. It solves nothing and says so. Its conclusions are judgements of promise (“phenomenal bonding or quantum holism”, “principles of informational composition”), not results. For this record its value is that the subject-summing argument is James’s argument against group minds, and that its footnote 7 objects to IIT’s exclusion postulate on grounds that have nothing to do with groups. |
| LIT-431 | Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain | Dennett & Kinsbourne (1992), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(2):183–201, with open peer commentary. There is no place in the brain where “it all comes together” for consciousness. Discriminations are made once, locally, and revised in parallel “drafts”, none canonical. The brain represents temporal order by content, not by the timing of its own vehicles, as a dated letter does. Colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit and Libet’s timing results stop looking anomalous. Whether a revision was pre-experiential (Stalinesque) or post-experiential (Orwellian) has no answer at that scale. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-367), the target article only; worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the Multiple Drafts model and of the case against “Cartesian materialism”, worked out on four timing phenomena (colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit, Libet’s backward referral and his delayed intention). Its sound core is the distinction between the time a content is represented and the time it represents. Its strong claim, that the Orwellian/Stalinesque distinction “need have no answer” below a few hundred milliseconds, is an argument from indistinguishability, not a demonstration. The open peer commentary (pp. 201–247) was not read. |
| LIT-443 v2 | Consciousness Explained | Dennett (1991), Little, Brown. Per its publisher, a “full-scale exploration of human consciousness” that “refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence”. Its fourteen contents entries run from “How are hallucinations possible?” and “A method for phenomenology”, through “Multiple drafts versus the Cartesian Theater” and “The architecture of the human mind”, to “Qualia disqualified” and “The reality of selves”. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted, printdisabled), no publisher or author copy is posted, and the Tufts Digital Library holds Dennett’s papers but not the book or draft chapters of it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-445 | From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0 | Oizumi, Albantakis & Tononi (2014), PLoS Computational Biology 10(5):e1003588. IIT 3.0 states five axioms of experience (existence, composition, information, integration, exclusion), turns each into a postulate about mechanisms in a state, and identifies an experience with the maximally irreducible conceptual structure of a “complex”. Exclusion makes a complex a local maximum of integrated conceptual information Φ over all overlapping sets of elements, so complexes cannot overlap and no subset or superset of a complex is conscious. Worked logic-gate examples show minor complexes beside a major one, an inactive network that is conscious, a minimally conscious photodiode, and a feed-forward “zombie” functionally equivalent to a conscious system. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-365), equations excepted; worth reading as the formal statement of the exclusion postulate that Schwitzgebel’s 2014 manuscript (LIT-159) attacks: “of all overlapping sets of elements, only one set can be conscious”, a complex being a local maximum of Φ against every overlapping set. It is IIT’s anti-nesting principle, stated as a postulate and motivated only by the phenomenological exclusion axiom; the paper’s Occam’s-razor argument is given for exclusion within a mechanism, not between systems. It also says plainly that function does not fix consciousness, which is IIT’s answer to whether agency built from parts brings experience with it. |
| LIT-450 | Self models | Metzinger (2007, rev. 2013), Scholarpedia 2(10):4174. There is no substantial self, only a phenomenal self-model (PSM): the conscious part of an organism’s self-model, an instrument of global control. A phenomenal self arises “if and only if a system operates under a transparent PSM”, one it cannot introspectively recognise as a model; a first-person perspective is a transparent model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Self-models can be unconscious and artificial, as in Bongard, Zykov and Lipson’s limping starfish robot; embodiment comes in three orders, the third conscious. Full-body illusions are offered as the experimental handle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-372); worth reading as Metzinger’s own short, open statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT) behind Being No One (LIT-467): there is no self, only a phenomenal self-model, and a system experiences itself as a self when that model is transparent, that is, when it cannot introspectively recognise it as a model. It is an encyclopedia article, not an argument: the central claim is stated as a definition with a prediction attached, its empirical examples are cited, and the online text is a revision later than the 2007 acceptance, with editing slips. |
| LIT-451 | Of Personal Identity | Hume (1739), Treatise 1.4.6, with the Appendix (1740). There is no impression of a self, “constant and invariable”, so no idea of one: introspection finds only “some particular perception or other”, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. The identity we ascribe to it is “fictitious”, like that of plants, ships and churches: an easy transition of the imagination along resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it, so that hard cases are “grammatical” rather than philosophical. The Appendix retracts the account of the connecting principle: two principles he cannot reconcile or renounce leave the matter “too hard for my understanding”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-386), in the Merivale–Millican critical text on davidhume.org, with the Appendix’s second thoughts (App. 10–21); worth reading as the founding statement of the bundle view and the first published retraction of it. The section finds no impression of a self, calls the mind “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”, and explains our ascription of identity to it as a fiction of the imagination run on resemblance and causation, the same fiction that makes a repaired ship or a rebuilt church “the same”. The Appendix then confesses that it cannot explain what unites the perceptions and leaves the problem “too hard for my understanding”. The section’s case is introspective and associationist; its Appendix is the clearest statement of what any bundle view owes. |
| LIT-467 v3 | Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity | Metzinger (2003), MIT Press. Per its publisher, “no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves”, and the phenomenal self is “the content of a ‘transparent self-model’”. A representationalist and functional analysis of the conscious first-person perspective, with conceptual “tools”, constraints on consciousness and neurophenomenological case studies (agnosia, neglect, blindsight, hallucination), asking whether being someone can be analysed at subpersonal levels. Unread: registered from the description and the contents; the theory is read in LIT-450. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text of the book could be reached. The MIT Press Direct edition is not open access and no author copy is posted. Its theory is read in Metzinger’s own short statement, “Self models” (LIT-450, read in full), and more fully in his “Précis: Being No One” (PSYCHE 11(5), 2005; LIT-568, read in full 2026-10-03), the read substitute for the book, which sets out six of its ten constraints and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. Retried 2026-11-01: OpenAlex still reports it closed with no open location; it is not in the Internet Archive’s MIT Press open-access collection, which holds Metzinger’s 2024 book (LIT-1943); MIT Press Direct returned a Cloudflare challenge; no author copy found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-469 v3 | Reasons and Persons | Parfit (1984), Clarendon Press; DOI-10.1093/019824908X.001.0001 is the 1986 reprint online. Four loosely connected parts, per the author’s abstract: self-defeating theories of rationality and morality; what one person can rationally want at different times, and attitudes to time; personal identity, where “most of us … have certain beliefs about this subject that are false, but hard to give up”; and obligations to future generations, with the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion. By the chapter abstracts, Part III defends a reductionist view on which identity is not what matters and draws consequences for self-interest and distributive justice. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, its chapter abstracts and the table of contents; the book is in copyright and no lawful full text was reachable (the Internet Archive copies are lending-only and were not opened), so it is unread and no NOTE is filed. By its publisher’s account, Part III argues that most of us hold false beliefs about personal identity, that psychological continuity and connectedness, not identity, is what matters, and that this should change our attitudes to our own future, to rationality and to morality. The record already leans on it at second hand: Birch’s Relation R, Velleman’s reading of Frankfurt and the identity-and-ethics survey all cite it. |
| LIT-568 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger (2005), PSYCHE 11(5), the author’s précis of Being No One. Minimal consciousness is a global world-model in a window of presence that cannot be recognised as a model (globality, presentationality, transparency). A phenomenal self is a transparent self-model: “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency comes in degrees, and the self-model’s opaque partition is what lets humans doubt their own self-representation. The unity of consciousness is a single global functional cluster. A first-person perspective is a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, and iterating it yields introspective and social intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-460), as the read substitute for Being No One (LIT-467), which it summarises in Metzinger’s own words. Worth reading as the most complete short statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT): more of the machinery than “Self models” (LIT-450), in particular the six constraints, the degrees of transparency, and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Phenomenal selfhood is a transparent self-model, “a function realized by a lack of information”; “no such things as selves exist in the world”. The unity of a conscious world is a global functional cluster bound by “highest-order binding”. It states the theory and its predictions; the evidence is cited, not shown, and the neural sections say how little is known. |
| LIT-1208 v3 | Binding and the Phenomenal Unity of Consciousness | Revonsuo (1999). Separates stimulus-related binding, any neural processing that represents a stimulus’s unity, conscious or not, from consciousness-related binding, the brain’s construction of phenomenally unified percepts, crediting the split to Smythies (1994); distinguishes phenomenal, neural and cognitive levels of the problem and five kinds of phenomenal binding; and argues from his own EEG study that 40-Hz synchrony accompanies the construction of a unified percept but is not the correlate of its content. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1406) in full, from the publisher’s typeset PDF posted on hedweb.com (https://www.hedweb.com/intelligence-explosion/binding.pdf); worth reading as a clear separation of stimulus-related binding, neural recovery of a stimulus’s unity whether or not anything is conscious, from consciousness-related binding, the construction of unified experience, with three levels of description and five kinds of phenomenal binding tied to the deficits that dissociate them. Read it knowing that it credits the main distinction to Smythies (1994), that its terms are not “functional” and “phenomenal”, and that its one empirical argument, on 40-Hz synchrony, is the author’s own EEG study of eight subjects. |
| LIT-1211 v2 | The phenomenal binding problem for neural networks | Percy & Agarwal (2026). A deliberately simple artificial neural network can implement functional binding but not phenomenal binding while keeping the distinctions between unconscious and conscious processing, which the authors use to structure the options for how phenomenal binding could be implemented. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful free copy exists and this client could not fetch it (2026-10-29). OpenAlex lists the article as hybrid open access under CC BY-NC-ND at the publisher, and Crossref gives the licence and the ScienceDirect PII S1053810026000115. The page https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810026000115 and its pdfft download returned HTTP 403 to curl and WebFetch, and Elsevier’s API needs a key. Europe PMC has the PubMed record (PMID 41637896) with no full text; no preprint was found. A browser fetch of the ScienceDirect copy is the cheapest way to read it. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1352 v2 | Towards a Mathematical Structure of Global Phenomenal Consciousness | Lee-Youngzie, Tsuchiya, Robinson, Dietz & Monti (2026), Entropy 28(6):615, a hypothesis article. Intra-phenomenal structures model the parts of one experience, and inter-phenomenal structures place an experience among others by similarity judgements. A presheaf maps each part, in a finite topology of parts, to the dissimilarity matrix measured for it. Agreement of narrow qualia on an overlap is read as phenomenal binding, and the presheaf’s being a sheaf as the broad quale’s being fixed by its parts. Worked for a two-hemifield visual field. A sheaf failure is read as disunity for binocular rivalry and as context dependence for the Ebbinghaus illusion. No data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1059) from the version of record in PubMed Central (PMC13298370, CC BY 4.0, via the Europe PMC full-text XML); worth reading as the first worked proposal to join intra-phenomenal (part–whole) and inter-phenomenal (similarity) qualia structures by a presheaf, with phenomenal binding read as agreement of measured narrow qualia on overlaps and a sheaf as a broad quale fixed by its parts. It is a hypothesis article with no data. It does not identify unity with a global section: it assumes unity always holds, and it reads a sheaf failure as disunity for binocular rivalry and as context dependence for the Ebbinghaus illusion without a criterion between them. Its worked topology example is malformed, and by its own definition of gluing the rivalry case is not a sheaf failure. |
| LIT-1835 | Binding and Consciousness | Revonsuo & Newman (1999), Consciousness and Cognition 8, 123–127. The editors’ introduction to the journal’s special issue on binding and consciousness, in which Revonsuo’s “Binding and the Phenomenal Unity of Consciousness” (LIT-1208) and Engel et al.’s temporal-binding paper appear. Not read: whether it states a functional/phenomenal distinction is the open question it is filed for. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-29, not read. A lawful free copy is located at an exact address: the Santa Fe Institute wiki, https://wiki.santafe.edu/images/8/8d/Revonsuo_and_Newman_1999_-_Binding_and_Consciousness.pdf, a scholarly third-party copy of the kind the owner’s ruling of 2026-10-29 counts. On 2026-10-29 the connection to that host was reset for curl (three attempts, and for the wiki’s root page too) and WebFetch got a 503, as on the earlier attempt recorded in NOTE-1406’s history. The failure is on access, not availability. OpenAlex reports the work closed with no repository copy; the publisher’s page (Academic Press, now Elsevier) is paid. A browser fetch of the wiki copy is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |