Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination

by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi
Penguin Books: 2000

some notes on this book. The chapter i'm in is about the unity of conscious experience. for one thing, i'm a bit sceptical about how they can claim that one of the primary characteristics of consciousness is that it's unified and can contain only one thought or decision, while at the same time talk about things like split brain patients, who can be conscious of 2 things at once, or make 2 decisions at the same time. maybe each of those consciousnesses is unified, but it's not really clear whether it's impossible for others to be able to do similar things. maybe it just takes practice. not sure if this matters.

second, from the cases where after strokes people's consciousness re-unifies itself and the person becomes unaware that anything is missing, this makes it very clear how we could have gaping holes in our normal perceptions of reality and not even be able to conceive of the fact that this is so, so strong is the impression that our field of view is complete. ... consequences for epistemology and objectivity...