Phenomenal Unity: Closure

Abstract

The chapter examines an account of phenomenal unity that appeals to the closure of phenomenal content under conjunction—‘closure,’ for short. The chapter begins by locating closure within the context of representational treatments of phenomenal consciousness. Four objections to closure are then examined. A first objection involves the claim that inconsistent states can be phenomenally unified. A second objection appeals to the fact that certain visual experiences appear to exhibit phenomenal unity in the absence of closure. A third objection involves the claim that closure cannot capture the unity between experiences drawn from different perceptual modalities. A fourth objection alleges that closure cannot account for the unity between different kinds of conscious states. It is argued that that there are plausible responses to the first three objections to closure but not to the fourth.