phenomenal-unity.
9 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-146 v2 | Winkielman et al. — The coherent and fluent mind | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-358 | Chalmers — The combination problem for panpsychism | A taxonomy, not a solution. The combination problem is three problems (subject, quality, structure) plus four smaller ones (unity, boundary, awareness, grain). Each yields an argument against constitutive panpsychism, and subject-summing and structural mismatch are the strongest. Responses fall into emergent, autonomous, identity and combinatorial panpsychism. The non-combinatorial ones pay in mental causation or revised physics. Phenomenal bonding, quantum holism, small palettes and informational composition are judged most promising, but none is shown to work. James’s argument at its origin is an argument against group minds, and a footnote objects to IIT’s exclusion postulate that it makes consciousness extrinsic. | Read |
| NOTE-365 | Integrated Information Theory 3.0 | The 2014 restatement of IIT. Five axioms of experience become five postulates about mechanisms in a state, and an experience is identified with the maximally irreducible conceptual structure of a complex. Exclusion is the anti-nesting rule: of all overlapping sets of elements, only the one with locally maximal Φ is conscious, so no subset or superset of a complex is. It is postulated from the axiom that experience has definite borders; Occam’s razor is invoked only for exclusion within a mechanism. Logic-gate examples give minor complexes, a conscious inactive network, a minimally conscious photodiode and a feed-forward zombie. Nothing larger than about a dozen elements is computable. | Read |
| NOTE-367 | Dennett & Kinsbourne — Time and the Observer | The Cartesian Theater is the tacit assumption that some place or moment in the brain makes contents conscious, so that arrival order there fixes experienced order. The Multiple Drafts model replaces it: discriminations are made once, locally, and revised in parallel; temporal order is represented by content, not by the timing of vehicles. Four timing “anomalies” then need no backward projection. At sub-second scales the difference between pre- and post-experiential revision is said to be only verbal. It is a conceptual argument over published data; no experiment is run. | Read |
| NOTE-372 | Self models | Metzinger’s compact statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity. No substantial self exists; there is a self-model, partly conscious (the PSM), used for global control. A phenomenal self exists if and only if the PSM is transparent; a first-person perspective is a transparent model of the intentionality relation. Self-models can be unconscious and artificial, and embodiment comes in three orders. The central claim is stated with a prediction, not argued; the examples are cited. The online text has editing slips and reference gaps. | Read |
| NOTE-386 | Of Personal Identity | No impression of a self is constant, so there is no idea of one; introspection finds only perceptions, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. Its ascribed identity is a fiction of the imagination, like that of ships, churches and plants, produced by resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it; hard cases are “grammatical”. The Appendix confesses that two principles, the distinctness of perceptions and the imperceptibility of real connexions, leave the unity of the mind unexplained. | Read |
| NOTE-460 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger’s own sketch of the self-model theory. Six constraints (globality, presentationality, transparency, convolved holism, dynamicity, perspectivalness) build up consciousness; a transparent self-model yields phenomenal selfhood, so “no such things as selves exist in the world”; transparency is graded, inversely proportional to the attentional availability of earlier processing stages. Phenomenal unity is one global functional cluster. The first-person perspective is a model of the intentionality relation, whose iteration gives introspective and social intelligence. A theory statement: no new evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-1059 | Lee-Youngzie et al. — Towards a mathematical structure of global phenomenal consciousness | A hypothesis article with no data. It maps the parts of an experience, ordered by subsumption into a finite topology, to similarity-judgement matrices of their qualia by a presheaf, and reads compatibility of narrow qualia on overlaps as the condition for phenomenal binding, and the presheaf’s being a sheaf as the broad quale’s being determined by its parts. It reads a sheaf failure as disunity in binocular rivalry and as context dependence in the Ebbinghaus illusion, and gives no rule for telling the two apart. Its worked topology example is malformed, and by its own definitions disagreement on an overlap is not a sheaf failure. | Read |
| NOTE-1406 | Revonsuo — Binding and the phenomenal unity of consciousness | Separates stimulus-related binding, neural processing that recovers a stimulus’s unity whether or not anything is conscious, from consciousness-related binding, the construction of phenomenally unified percepts, crediting the split to Smythies (1994). Distinguishes the phenomenal, neural and cognitive levels at which binding is posed, lists five kinds of phenomenal binding with the deficits that dissociate them, and argues from his own EEG result that 40-Hz synchrony accompanies constructing a unified percept, not holding it. | Read |