There are researchers in cognitive science who use clinical and experimental evidence to draw some rather skeptical conclusions about a central feature of our conscious experience, its unity. They maintain that the examination of clinical phenomena reveals that human consciousness has a much more fragmentary character than the one we normally attribute to it. In the article, these claims are questioned by examining some of the clinical studies on the deficit of anosognosia. I try to show that these studies support (...) a moderate sense of the unity of reflexive consciousness. (shrink)

Good physical experiments conform to the basic methodological standards of experimental design: they are objective, reliable, and valid. But is this also true of thought experiments? Especially problems of personal identity have engendered hypothetical scenarios that are very distant from the actual world. These imagined situations have been conspicuously ineffective at resolving conflicting intuitions and deciding between the different accounts of personal identity. Using prominent examples from the literature, I argue that this is due to many of these thought experiments (...) not adhering to the methodological standards that guide experimental design in nearly all other disciplines. I also show how empirically unwarranted background assumptions about human physiology render some of the hypothetical scenarios that are employed in the debate about personal identity highly misleading. (shrink)

When the stored representation of the meaning of a stimulus is accessed through the processing of a sensory input it is maintained in an activated state for a certain amount of time that allows for further processing. This semantic activation is generally accompanied by conscious identification, which can be demonstrated by the ability of a person to perform discriminations on the basis of the meaning of the stimulus. The idea that a sensory input can give rise to semantic activation without (...) concomitant conscious identification was the central thesis of the controversial research in subliminal perception. Recently, new claims for the existence of such phenomena have arisen from studies in dichotic listening, parafoveal vision, and visual pattern masking. Because of the fundamental role played by these types of experiments in cognitive psychology, the new assertions have raised widespread interest. (shrink)

It is widely felt that the sorts of ideas current in modern laterality and split-brain research are largely without precedent in the behavioral and brain sciences. This paper not only challenges that view, but makes a first attempt to define the relevance of older concepts and data to present research programs.

In this paper it is argued that the experimental data on commissurotomy patients provide no grounds for denying the singular personhood of commissurotomy patients. This is because, contrary to most philosophical accounts, there is no “unity of consciousness” discriminating condition for singular personhood that is violated in the case of commissurotomy patients, and because no contradictions arise when singular personhood is ascribed to commissurotomy patients.

In this paper it is argued that the experimental data on commissurotomy patients provide no grounds for denying the singular personhood of commissurotomy patients. This is because, contrary to most philosophical accounts, there is no “unity of consciousness” discriminating condition for singular personhood that is violated in the case of commissurotomy patients, and because no contradictions arise when singular personhood is ascribed to commissurotomy patients.