A Critique of Peebles’ s Reductionist Approach to the Unity of Consciousness

Many philosophers of mind hold that there is a distinctive relation, called the unity of consciousness, among the simultaneous phenomenal states of a subject at a particular time. Most theorists of the unity of consciousness maintain that the unity of consciousness itself has a phenomenal quality. Graham Peebles, in contrast to the majority of theorists of the unity of consciousness, takes a reductionist approach based on two central claims. First, the unity that obtains among all conscious states is merely a form of access unity. Accordingly, the claim that the unity of consciousness has a phenomenal quality is rejected within Peebles’s proposed approach. Peebles’s second central claim is that the only kinds of unity that have phenomenal quality are objectual and spatial unities, and that their phenomenal quality is sensory in nature. In this article, while providing a general introduction to the literature on the unity of consciousness and the relevant terminology in this field, I argue that both of Peebles’s central claims face serious problems. His first claim violates five fundamental constraints on the unity of consciousness: its comprehensiveness, its restriction to actual states, its restriction to phenomenal states, its indissolubility, and its non-fusibility. His second claim can likewise be criticized on three grounds. First, the phenomenal quality of objectual and spatial unities is not sensory. Second, spatial unity should not, strictly speaking, be regarded as a kind of unity. Third, privileging these two types of relations among mental states over other relations lacks any principled justification.