Great article, thanks for posting! I typed out a long thing that got lost, so I’ll cut to the chase and do what everyone else is doing and give my rebuttal: cog

Great article, thanks for posting! I typed out a long thing that got lost, so I’ll cut to the chase and do what everyone else is doing and give my rebuttal: cognition is absolutely composed of many non-unified (and often almost-entirely-unconscious) systems, much like a computer is composed of many disjointed programs. But consciousness is unity itself, in my view — the fact that most of our animal processes are disjointed doesn’t say much about us as sapient beings, even if those processes take up “most” of us on some given scale (time, energy used, neurons involved, whatever). But I’m just vaguely gesturing — this view was first and best characterized in 1801: For example, this universal identity of the apperception of the manifold given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations and is possible only by means of the consciousness of this synthesis… For the empirical consciousness which accompanies different representations is in itself fragmentary and disunited, and without relation to the identity of the subject. This relation, then, does not exist because I accompany every representation with consciousness, but because I join one representation to another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them… in other words, the analytical unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a synthetical unity.[16] …for the reason alone that I can comprehend the variety of my representations in one consciousness, do I call them my representations, for otherwise I must have as many-coloured and various a self as are the representations of which I am conscious. Synthetical unity of the manifold in intuitions, as given à priori, is therefore the foundation of the identity of apperception itself, which antecedes à priori all determinate thought. But the conjunction of representations into a conception is not to be found in objects themselves… but it is on the contrary an operation of the understanding itself, which is nothing more than the faculty of conjoining à priori and of bringing the variety of given representations under the unity of apperception. This principle is the highest in all human cognition. - Immanuel Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason