The “One-Experience” Account of Phenomenal Unity: A
Review of Michael Tye’s “Consciousness and Persons”
Bernard W. Kobes
Department of Philosophy
Arizona State University
Box 874102
Tempe, Arizona 85287-4102
Copyright (c) Bernard Kobes 2005
kobes@asu.edu

PSYCHE 11 (5), June 2005
REVIEW OF: Tye, Michael. 2003. Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 203 pp. ISBN: 0-262-20147-X
Consciousness has been defined as that annoying period between naps, and this grumpy
definition may not be wholly facetious, if Michael Tye’s latest book is right. Tye’s main
goal here is to develop a theory of the phenomenal unity of experience at a time, and its
diachronic analog, the moment-to-moment continuity of one’s experiential stream fromthe time one wakes up to the time consciousness lapses.
This attractively concise book is itself like a rapid stream. Divided into numberedsections of usually only one or two paragraphs each, it offers crisp arguments on a wide
range of topics; these include the metaphysics of material things, the individuation ofexperience, the unity of the body image and bodily sensations, the unity of occurrent
thoughts and moods, the specious present, the nature of the disunity in split-brain
subjects, the ontology of persons, and vagueness in personal identity. Despite its brisk
pace the flow is well-controlled; seldom is the exposition cloudy or turbulent.
In what follows, after surveying Tye’s main positions, I highlight some strange
consequences of his “one experience” thesis. I also sketch a way in which much of thespirit of Tye’s explanatory project could survive even in the absence of this peculiar
doctrine. I conclude with a special problem for Tye’s treatment of the diachronic case.
The phenomenal unity of consciousness, the intuitive “togetherness” ofexperienced qualities at a time, is according to Tye a real phenomenon. However,PSYCHE: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/

philosophical accounts of this unity typically assume that the explanatory goal is tocharacterize some sort of phenomenal or experiential glue that binds smaller experiences
into larger, over-arching experiences. This is a mistake. In fact we can have no
phenomenal awareness of our own experience at all; as Tye and fellow“representationalists” such as Fred Dretske stress, we can be aware only of qualities that
our experience represents to be instantiated in our bodies and in the world.
One’s experience of the world at a time is not composed of other, smaller
experiences, any more than a painting is composed of other, smaller paintings. Each of us
normally has only one phenomenal experience at a time, and this is a maximal state ofPANIC—poised, abstract, non-conceptual, intentional content. The unity of one’sexperience is wholly at the level of qualities represented in experience. These qualities
include not only the colors, shapes, sounds, textures, smells, etc. of external things, butalso body image, bodily sensations, auditory images accompanying thought, and moods,
all of which represent states of, or events in, one’s body, or desires with respect to suchstates and events. The state is maximal because no experience can have a proper part thatis an experience.
One’s experience at time t represents all of these qualities as “together”. A closure
principle obtains for experiences under conjunction: given any experience e at time t, if erepresents content q1 and also represents content q2, then e represents the conjunctivecontent (q1 & q2). (Cf. p. 37; here and in the diachronic case below, I have rephrased theclosure principle for clarity.) Phenomenally unified qualities are therefore closed underconjunction.
There is similarly a uniquely correct way to individuate experiences over time.
One’s experience of the world over time is not composed of other, smaller experiences
over time, any more than a movie is composed of other, smaller movies. The
experienced present is a small temporal window, a specious present, a duration of somemilliseconds that, for the experiencer, is now. In virtue of the specious present one
experiences an extended event, such as a sequence of sounds or words, “all in one as awhole” (87). Thus one experiences continuity, change, and succession of qualities in theworld.
Direct phenomenal unity through time is a relation between a quality q2
experienced in one specious present, and a quality q1 experienced in the immediately
prior specious present, if and only if q2 is experienced as succeeding or continuing on
from the prior q1. Indirect phenomenal unity through time is likewise a relation between
an experienced quality q2 and an experienced quality q1, if and only if a chain can beconstructed between them, where each link is between items that are directly unified.
The relation of indirect phenomenal unity is therefore the ancestral of direct phenomenal
unity (100).
An experience normally begins when one wakes and normally ends when one
falls into a dreamless sleep; there is only one experience in any such interval, and it is notcomposed of other experiences. Thus the problem of what binds experiences together
across time dissolves: there are no experiences (plural) that are so bound.
A principle of closure under conjunction holds likewise for diachronic unity.
Given any temporally extended experience e, if e represents phenomenal content q1 as
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instantiated at t1 and also represents phenomenal content q2 as instantiated at t2, then e
represents the conjunctive phenomenal content (q1-at-t1 & q2-at-t2) (cf. p. 101.)
Experienced qualities that are (directly or indirectly) unified across time are therefore
closed under conjunction.
A split-brain subject, in whom the corpus callosum has been severed, is still asingle person and normally has phenomenally unified consciousness. However, underexperimental conditions her consciousness can be briefly split, like a stream going aroundtwo sides of a large rock. Tye argues that in such a case transitivity of phenomenal
consciousness may fail: the sensation of a pin prick in the neck region may bephenomenally unified with each of two visual images presented to the left and righthemispheres under experimental conditions, even though those experienced images are
not phenomenally unified with each other.
Tye claims on behalf of his account: “Nothing that we ordinarily say about
experience needs to be given up. No large bullets need to be swallowed.” (107). This isquite false, I am convinced. In fact a great deal of what we would ordinarily say about
experience must be given up, on Tye’s “one experience” account of phenomenal unity. If
I hear music while watching the orchestra, then although the experienced sounds couldhave existed without the experienced sights, my actual auditory experience could nothave existed without my actual visual experience, for they turn out to be strictly identical(33). Again, suppose the experienced sights actually go on longer than the experienced
sounds; still, my actual visual experience does not go on longer than my actual auditory
experience, for they are strictly identical (34). Suppose the music I experience lasts fortwo hours; strictly, on Tye’s view, my experience of the music began many hours earlier,when I woke up, and lasted until many hours later, when I fell sleep.
If a late-entering concert-goer steps on my toe while taking his seat, then mytoken experience of pain is strictly identical to my token experience of pleasure at themusic. In fact, my token experience of pain is identical to my token experience ofpleasure even if there are many (sleepless) intervening hours. “I had many strange
experiences today”, said by one who took no naps during the day, turns out to be strictlyfalse. (The paraphrase “I had an experience of many strange things today”—cf. p. 97—isdecidedly strained if, as we may suppose, there is no natural similarity or unity among thestrange things experienced.) In the opposite direction, “I have had the experience of being
woken up by a crying baby six times in a single night” also turns out to be strictly false,
since on Tye’s account no experience could span both sides of a dreamless sleep.
I say that, like conflicts, flirtations, lessons, celebrations, representations, andevents in general (and unlike paintings and movies—artifacts with conventionalboundaries), experiences as ordinarily individuated permit hierarchical nesting. A conflict
between two nations that lasts ten years may have a week-long conflict between twoarmies as a proper part, which may in turn have smaller conflicts as proper parts, and soon. Similarly, my experience backpacking for several days may include my experienceof hiking Oak Creek Canyon as a proper part, which may include my experience ofencountering a bear, and so on. But on Tye’s way of individuating experiences all
experiences are maximal, so no nesting of experiences is possible; no experience can everbe a proper part of an experience. This amounts to a puritanical regimentation of ourordinary free and easy ways of counting experiences.
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The strangeness of Tye’s way of individuating experiences would be acceptable if
it were a necessary part of the best account of phenomenal unity. But in fact Tye’s own
view suggests the elements of an account of phenomenal unity that does not depend on
the “one experience” doctrine. Consistently with treating experiences as hierarchicallynested, let e be a maximal experience at time t if and only if e is not a proper part of any
experience, and the qualities that e represents at t are experienced as together.
Togetherness may be explicated by its entailment of closure under conjunction ofexperienced qualities: if e represents quality q1 and also represents quality q2, then e
represents the quality (q1 & q2). One might say, with Tye, that experienced qualities q1
and q2 are phenomenally unified at t if and only if (and because) there is at least one
maximal experience e at t in which q1 and q2 are both represented. One might then add,against Tye, that non-maximal experiences e1 of q1 and e2 of q2 are both parts ofexperience e.
This is not to treat a maximal experience e as any sort of phenomenal glue joining
e1 and e2. Maximal experiences have themselves as non-proper parts; no vicious regress
looms. The explanatory work—such as it is on this deflationary account—is being doneby the experienced togetherness of qualities q1 and q2 in a maximal experience, just as onTye’s account. The account is compatible with Tye’s representationalism: phenomenal
unity is still fundamentally a relation between experienced qualities, rather than a relation
between experiences. My point is not at all to defend this account, but rather to note thatmuch of the spirit of Tye’s (first-order, deflationary, representationalist) project need not
be hostage to the excessively regimented “one experience” doctrine.
Turning briefly to the diachronic case, I suggest that the following principle isplausible: experience e represents phenomenal content q only if q is available forcognition in virtue of e. This principle seems required by the poisedness of phenomenal
content, the “P” of Tye’s PANIC account of such content (cf. p. 175). Yet Tye’s accountof diachronic unity seems incompatible with this principle. Suppose a person S suffers
sudden massive memory loss, but does not lose consciousness. Since S’s conscious
experience is continuous across the amnestic event, Tye would count S as having only
one relevant temporally extended experience. Qualities experienced before and after theamnestic event are therefore indirectly phenomenally unified, and the relevant
experienced content must be closed under conjunction. If the experience e represents
phenomenal content q1-at-t1 prior to the amnestic event, and content q2-at-t2 after theevent, then Tye’s account entails that e represents the content (q1-at-t1 & q2-at-t2). But
plainly the content (q1-at-t1 & q2-at-t2) is not at any time available for cognition in virtueof e, since given the amnesia, by the time q2 is experienced S has no memory at all of q1.
So Tye’s account of diachronic phenomenal unity is incompatible with a plausible
principle of availability of phenomenal content, a poisedness principle apparentlyrequired by his own PANIC theory.1

1A similar argument is given independently in Tim Bayne's paper, "Divided Brains & Unified
Phenomenology: An Essay on Michael Tye’s ‘Consciousness and Persons’", forthcoming in PhilosophicalPsychology.
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Tye’s account of phenomenal unity across time makes it a diachronic analog ofthe synchronic notion of phenomenal togetherness, which Tye explains as the relation of
being represented in the same experience, where the individuation of experiences ishighly regimented. In this apparently symmetric relation, memory plays no essential role.
Since indirect unity is the ancestral of direct unity, it must also be transitive. But if
indirect phenomenal unity is both symmetric and transitive, this creates a problem for
Tye’s treatment of split brain cases. There Tye argues, cogently I think, that underexperimental conditions phenomenal consciousness in a single subject is briefly
phenomenally disunified. A split-brain subject under experimental conditions may
visually experience the word pen in one hemisphere, and knife in another, without
experiencing them together. The problem is that if indirect phenomenal unity is both
symmetric and transitive, then the experienced word pen and the experienced word knife
will be diachronically unified, for there will be a chain of (appropriately related) specious
presents stretching into the past, then back again into the future along the other branch,linking pen and knife. The two experienced words turn out to be synchronically disunified
but diachronically unified—surely an unwelcome result. A natural response to thisdifficulty would be to make the relation of diachronic unity asymmetric. But thisresponse is ad hoc in the absence of any role for memory in the account of unity acrosstime, and it sits ill with Tye’s fundamental idea of phenomenal togetherness as therelation of being represented in the same experience, where the individuation ofexperiences is highly regimented.
To sum up: the one-experience account of phenomenal unity is more revisionary
with respect to common sense than Tye is prepared to acknowledge, and it is doubtfulthat the revision is justified by any explanatory gain. This is especially so in thediachronic case, where Tye’s theory suffers from ignoring the role of memory inconstituting phenomenal unity across time. For these and other reasons I am not able toaccept the account. Even so, I admire the ingenuity of this rigorously first-order andseverely deflationary account of phenomenal unity.2

2

Many thanks to Brian Fiala for helpful discussions on these topics.
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