What are the elements of experience?

Abstract

Several debates about conscious experience make reference to its parts, aspects, components, or, as we might neutrally say, elements. Are these elements themselves experiences? Are they unified with each other, and if so how? Are they more basic than, or less basic than, the whole field of consciousness? Or are there not really any distinct elements within experience at all? But it is not always clear what it means for experience to be divisible into many elements, and different conceptions of such elements may entail different, even opposing, answers to these debated questions. I argue that there are broadly two ways of thinking of the elements of experience: as constituent elements, the underlying parts that make something up, defined by their potential for independent existence, and as manifest elements, the distinguishable aspects that the subject can tell apart. I argue, moreover, that there is no obvious reason to assume that these two sorts of elements will line up with one another, and that this has important implications in multiple debates about the structure of conscious experience.