Lizzie in Philosophy and the Mind Sciences

Action unity of consciousness.

Now out in a special issue of the Philosophy and the Mind Sciences on "structuralism in the science of consciousness," a new paper from Lizzie Schechter on the question of conscious unity in relation to split-brain phenomena, abstracted below. Her title is "Action unity of consciousness."

Two kinds of behavioral dissociation are distinctive of the so-called split-brain phenomenon and first motivated the thought that split-brain consciousness might be structurally dual, with each cerebral hemisphere associated with a distinct stream or sphere of consciousness. One of these behavioral dissociations, however, tends to diminish in observed frequency and severity over time. What implications does this have for the debate over the structure of split-brain consciousness? Some neuroscientists have recently argued that motoric information remains interhemispherically integrated and that this shows that split-brain consciousness is unitary after all. This paper argues that an account of conscious unity grounded in that sort of integration would look quite different from the most familiar accounts of conscious unity. It proposes a new kind of unity relation that might persist after split-brain surgery and then considers whether this relation is a genuine kind of conscious unity.