This chapter examines three disorders of consciousness that are frequently said to involve breakdowns in the unity of consciousness: anosognosia, schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder (‘mulitiplicity’). There is some truth in such claims for in each of these conditions certain aspects of the unity of consciousness are impaired: in anosognosia we see a breakdown in the normal unity...
Consciousness in experimental subjects is typically inferred from reports and other forms of voluntary behaviour. A wealth of everyday experience confirms that healthy subjects do not ordinarily behave in these ways unless they are conscious. Investigation of consciousness in vegetative state patients has been based on the search for neural evidence that such broad functional capacities are...
Abstract Hypnosis appears to generate unusual—and sometimes even astonishing—changes in the contents of consciousness. Hypnotic subjects report perceiving things that are not there, they report not perceiving things that are there, and they report unusual alterations in the phenomenology of agency. In addition to apparent alterations in the contents of consciousness, hypnosis also appears to...
AbstractConsciousness is unified in various ways, but the nature and basis of its unity remains a matter of intense debate. This debate promises to illuminate the nature of experience, the self, and various pathologies of consciousness.