Yeah, I think that for one conscious experience e they would like to say not only are there a bunch of qualia involved (the "aspects" of e: A(e)) but that, in N

Yeah, I think that for one conscious experience e they would like to say not only are there a bunch of qualia involved (the "aspects" of e: A(e)) but that, in Nagel's famous phrase, there is something it is like to be the subject experiencing A(e) in the same instant, over and above the set of qualia A(e) itself. I agree that "non-conscious qualia" is an incoherent notion, but I'm not convinced this rules out a "phenomenal unity" as you argue - they are positing the unity as "phenomenal" not as the substrate (or medium, as you put it) of qualia, so more than just the raw fact of consciousness is implied. One point of comparison might be Wittgenstein's famous example of the duck-rabbit - a bistable ambiguous image that can be seen either as a picture of a duck or as a picture of a rabbit. One might assume the qualia associated with looking at the picture are the same whether one is seeing it as a duck or as a rabbit - the same shapes and colours - and yet there is a difference: > The change of aspect. "But surely you would say the picture is altogether different now!" [...] > If I saw the duck-rabbit as a rabbit, then I saw: these shapes and colours (I give them in detail) -- and I saw besides something like this: and here I point to a number of different pictures of rabbits [...] > 'Seeing as ...' is not part of perception. And for that reason it is like seeing and again not like. Perhaps this un-perceptual yet pervasive and arguably phenomenal unity subsuming the duck-rabbit qualia - that which flips from duck to rabbit and back - is analogous to what the authors intend with their "subsumptive unity thesis". Congrats on commenting on TFA, btw :) I thought it was an interesting read, though I start to lose my grip on the math around the topology section.