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).
5 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-063 | The unity of experience is the integration of one global world-model into a single functional cluster, and it does not require a self-model | Metzinger’s précis of Being No One (2005), LIT-568: the globality constraint makes every conscious content part of one world-model. On the functional level that is “highest-order binding” into a single causal role, and on the neural level the prediction of “one single area of maximal causal density”, after Tononi and Edelman’s dynamic core. “What you subjectively experience upon experiencing your world as coherent is the high internal correlation strength between a subset of physical events in your own brain.” A unified world comes before a self: the minimal case is “Selfless Snapshot Consciousness”, and fully depersonalized states are “non-subjective consciousness”. The neural half is a cited hypothesis, the précis says little is known, and how the cluster becomes one subject’s is left open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-573 | Signals of processing quality from different senses, such as fluency, familiarity and coherence, pool into one content-nonspecific feeling, and that pooled feeling contributes to the unity of conscious experience across modalities, alongside the integration of specific features; in support, coherence in one modality shifts judgments of regularity, familiarity and possibility about unrelated targets in another | Winkielman, Ziembowicz & Nowak (2015), LIT-190, read in full in NOTE-146. An opinion piece whose main evidence is the authors’ own three experiments (Ziembowicz et al. 2013), summarised without statistics and not read by the record. The authors state that direct evidence is still needed that the effects run through changed experience and that its integration is causal. No study cited measures unity of experience. The LIT is itself Proposed; this account carries its promotion condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-644 | Panpsychism escapes dualism’s problem of mental causation only in its constitutive Russellian form, where micro-experiences constitute macro-experience; that form meets three combination problems, of subjects, qualities and structure, and every response that avoids combining (emergent, autonomous or identity panpsychism) gives back the advantage in mental causation or revised physics, while the combinatorial responses remain unworked | Chalmers (2016/2017), LIT-395, read in full in NOTE-358 from the April 2015 draft. A map of the problem, not a solution or an impossibility proof, and the author says so. The dilemma is argued case by case; the strongest arguments against constitutive panpsychism, subject-summing and structural mismatch, rest on conceivability premises and on a structure-preservation principle called plausible, not shown. The verdicts on which responses are most promising are judgements of promise. | Proposed |
| THEORY-875 | Phenomenal binding of the parts of an experience can be modelled as agreement, on overlaps, of measured similarity structures assigned to the parts by a presheaf, and the broad quale is fixed by its parts exactly when that presheaf is a sheaf; a sheaf failure may mark disunity, as proposed for binocular rivalry, or context dependence within one unified experience, as in the Ebbinghaus illusion, and the framework does not yet say which | Lee-Youngzie, Tsuchiya, Robinson, Dietz & Monti (2026), LIT-1352, read in full in NOTE-1059. A hypothesis article with no data. It proposes the presheaf and two readings of its failure, disunity for rivalry and context dependence for the Ebbinghaus illusion, without a criterion between them. It does not identify unity with a global section, since it assumes unity always holds. Its global section is measured data, its worked topology example is malformed, and by its own definition of gluing the rivalry case is not a sheaf failure. It answers QUESTION-255 only by showing that a sheaf failure need not be disunity. | Proposed |
| THEORY-882 v2 | Consciousness in an inferring system requires three things: a unified generative model of its world; entry to that model by a precision-weighted competition that coherent inferences win; and epistemic depth, the recursive sharing of the model back through the hierarchy, carried by a hyper-model that predicts and sets precision at every level; awareness then varies with epistemic depth, not with the richness of contents, and a first-person perspective, a self-model and agency are not required | Laukkonen, Friston & Chandaria (2025), LIT-1363, read in full in NOTE-1063 from PsyArXiv v3. A conceptual proposal with no data and no simulation. The three conditions are asserted necessary; their joint sufficiency is argued for AI and then withdrawn for phenomenal experience in a footnote. The formal part (Table 1) is a hierarchy with layer-wise precision hyper-parameters, from which none of the properties the text gives epistemic depth is derived. | Proposed |