Concerning the Unity of Consciousness (original) (raw)

1995, Faith and Philosophy

Ever since Descartes there have been philosophers who have claimed that the unity of conscious experience argues strongly against the possibility that the mind or self is a material thing. My contention is that the recent neglect of this argument is a mistake, and that it places a serious and perhaps insuperable obstacle in the way of materialist theories of the mind. Ever since Descartes 1 there have been philosophers who have claimed that the unity of conscious experience argues strongly against the possibility that the mind or self is a material thing. This argument surfaced from time to time during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but recently it has been neglected. My contention is that this neglect is a mistake, and that the argument places a serious and perhaps insuperable obstacle in the way of materialist theories of the mind. I The argument against materialism from the unity of consciousness is clearly present in Leibniz, as Margaret Wilson has shown. 2 Indeed, the classic form given the argument in the Second Paralogism may well be viewed as Kant's reflective development of the argument taken from Leibniz. Kant's version goes as follows: Every composite substance is an aggregate of several substances, and the actions of a composite, or whatever inheres in it as thus composite, is an aggregate of several actions or accidents, distributed among the plurality of the substances. Now an effect which arises from the concurrence of many acting substances is indeed possible, nar:nely, when this effect is external only (as, for instance, the motion of a body is the combined motion of all its parts). But with thoughts, as internal accidents belonging to a thinking being, it is different. For suppose it be the composite that thinks: then every part of it would be a part of the thought,> and only all of them taken together would be the whole thought. But this cannot consistently be maintained. For representations (for instance, the