The Phenomenal Unity of Consciousness: Prospects for a Phenomenal Character-based Account

Conscious mental states have several puzzling features. One is that they are phenomenally unified: your concurrent experiences of, say, seeing a blue sky and feeling a headache are not experienced separately but, rather, together, as forming a unified experience. After decades of neglect, the phenomenal unity of consciousness has now firmly entered the research agenda of analytic philosophers of mind. A major task in this agenda concerns the explanation of this unity, usually framed in terms of which personal-level facts ground phenomenal unity. This is the problem of phenomenal unity (PPU). Several accounts have been proposed to address this issue, none of which has settled the debate. In this paper, I am to make some progress on this matter by exploring the prospects for a solution that appeals to the phenomenal character of conscious states, namely their what-it-is-like aspect. Although phenomenal character is often employed to describe what is unified in phenomenally unified conscious states, no approach has explicitly focused on whether it might also play the role of phenomenally unifying these conscious states. I argue that when so-called subjective character (the conscious states’ property of being phenomenally given to their subject) is incorporated into the structure of phenomenal character, the solution in question looks very promising, as it avoids the shortcomings of extant solutions to PPU.