A Model of Disunified Human Experience

It's a philosophical truism that human conscious experience is unified: If you're at a bar, hearing music, tasting beer, and feeling pleasantly relaxed, those experiences don't occur merely side by side. They are joined together into an integrated whole, an experience of music-with-beer-with-relaxation.

I'm not sure this truism is correct. As I suggested in an earlier post, experiential unity might be an artifact of introspection and memory: When we introspectively notice that we're experiencing music, beer, and relaxation all at once, we thereby bind those experiences into a whole. Likewise, when we remember such moments, we reconstruct them as unified. But it doesn't follow that those experiences, even if they all occurred simultaneously in you, were unified rather than transpiring separately. Experiences of music, beer, and relaxation might have all being going on inside of you, no more joined together than those experiences are joined with the similar experiences of your friend across the table. Simple co-occurrence doesn't entail experiential unity.

If this possibility is coherent, then introspection and memory can't establish that experience is always unified. At most, they show that introspected and remembered experiences present themselves as unified. But that leaves open the status of unintrospected, unremembered experiences. Unity becomes difficult to verify by standard phenomenological methods.

But the issue needn't be intractable. We just need to approach it less directly, for example by exploring what follows from a well-established theory of consciousness. If some well-motivated Theory X implies unity (or disunity), that would provide reason to accept its conclusion.

I'll now present a candidate Theory X. I'm not suggesting that this is the right theory of consciousness! For one thing, it's simplistic. I'm sure the mind is much more complicated than I'm about to say. I offer this theory only as a proof of concept. There could be a theory of consciousness with massive disunity as an implication.

This theory combines Global Workspace Theory and Recurrent Processing Theory. According to this hybrid, Global Workspace Theory governs attended experiences -- those targeted by introspection or reconstructed in memory -- while Recurrent Processing Theory governs unattended experiences.

The mind, on this picture, is composed of many separate "modules" that work mostly independently, connected by a workspace where a small amount of attended information is shared globally. There's a visual module, an auditory module, modules for motor activity, episodic memory, and so on. When we attend to something -- say, the taste of beer -- the information from the relevant module is broadcast into the Global Workspace, where it can be accessed by and influence processes in all the other modules. When unattended, the information stays local.

Here's one illustration of this type of architecture:

[the Global Workspace; source]

Orthodox Global Workspace Theory holds that only what is broadcast into the workspace is conscious. Theory X alters that assumption. Many people hold that conscious experience vastly outruns attention. Many people hold, that is, that you can experience the hum of traffic in the background when you're not attending to it, and the feeling of your feet in your shoes, and the leftover taste of coffee in your mouth, etc. -- all in a peripheral way, simultaneously, when your focus is elsewhere. Theory X, drawing on Recurrent Processing Theory, holds that such processes are conscious whenever there's enough cognitive activity of the right sort (recurrent processing, for example) in the modules, even without global broadcast.

The picture, then, is this: We have multiple sensory (and other) experiences all running simultaneously, each with enough cognitive processing to be conscious, but few of which are selected for global availability through attention.

Is there reason to think these modular processes are unified with one another? I see no reason to think so, if they're genuinely modular -- that is, if their processing stays local, exerting little influence elsewhere. The taste-of-beer processing stays in the tasting module. The sound-of-music processing stays in the auditory module. No link up. No straightforward causal, functional, or physiological basis for a unified experience of beer-with-music rather than, separately, an experience of beer and an experience of music.

When we introspect the beer and music simultaneously, we pull both into the Global Workspace, and there they unify. We might then mistakenly think they were unified all along, but that's an illusion of introspection. It's an example of the "refrigerator light error", the error of thinking that the light is always on because it's always on when you open the door to check.

On this model, disunity is the normal human condition. Our experiences are fragmented, except when we pull them together through attention. We just don't realize that fact because, so to speak, we only attend to what we attend to.

Two caveats:

First, this is probably not the right model of consciousness. But I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if the correct model is similar enough to have the same implications. If so, we can't simply accept the unity of consciousness as a given.

Second, the recurrent peripheral, modular processes that don't make it into the workspace might not be determinately conscious. They might be only borderline conscious, in the indeterminate middle between consciousness and nonconsciousness, like a color can be indeterminately between green and not-green. This opens a third possibility, alongside unity and disunity: unity among the determinately conscious experiences with a hazy penumbra of indeterminate experiences that remain disunified. (There are further possibilities beyond these three; but save them for another day.)

Backup and Death for Humanlike AI

Most AI systems can be precisely copied. Suppose this is also true of future conscious AI persons, if any exist. Backup and fissioning should then be possible, transforming the significance of identity and death in ways our cultural and conceptual tools can't currently handle.

Suppose that two humanlike AI neighbors move in next door to you, Shriya and Alaleh.[1] Shriya and Alaleh are (let's stipulate) conscious AI persons with ordinary, humanlike emotional range and, as far as feasible, ordinary, humanlike cognition.[2] Each undergoes an expensive annual backup procedure. Their information is securely stored, so that if the processors responsible for their personalities, values, skills, habits, and memories are destroyed, a new robotic body can be purchased and the saved information reinstalled. Subjectively, the restored person would be indistinguishable from the person at the time of the backup.

As it happens, Shriya dies in a parachuting accident. (Safety precautions for robot parachuters have yet to be perfected.) But "dies" isn't exactly the right word, since a week later a new Shriya arrives, restored from a back up from five months ago. Shriya-2 says it feels as if she fell asleep in March, then awoke in August with no sense that time had passed.

Shriya-2 has no direct memories of the intervening months, though Alaleh fills her in on major events and selected details. She'll also need to retake her knitting course. She only died in the sense that Mario "dies" in Super Mario Bros: losing progress and returning to a save point -- so different from ordinary human and animal death that it really deserves a different word. Maybe this is why Shriya was so willing to parachute despite the risks.

Should you mourn Shriya's loss? Should Alaleh? There's something to mourn: Five months is not trivial. In one sense, a part of a life has been lost -- or maybe just forgotten? Is it more like amnesia?

Consider variations. Suppose Shriya hadn't been able to afford a backup for the past ten years and is restored to her twenty-five-year-old self instead of her thirty-five-year-old self. What if her last backup was at age five? That would be much more like death. The new Shriya would be nothing like the old, and would likely grow into a very different person. Is death, then, a matter of degree?

Shriya-2 receives the original Shriya's possessions. This "death" isn't enough to trigger inheritance by others. But what about contracts and promises made after the last backup? Suppose the original Shriya promised in July to deliver lectures in China, and Shriya-2 -- who has no memory of this and dreads the idea -- must decide whether to honor the commitment. If the backup is from five months before, perhaps she should. If it's from five years before, maybe not. And if it's a child, presumably not.

What about reward and punishment? Should Shriya-2 accept a Nobel prize for work done post-backup? Should Shriya-2 be imprisoned for crimes committed in July, which she couldn't even possibly remember having committed and which -- she might plausibly say -- were committed by a different person. In defense of this view, Shriya-2 might offer a thought experiment: If she had been installed in a duplicate body immediately after the March backup, thereafter living her own life, she'd have no criminal responsibility for what her other branch in did July. The only difference between that case and the actual case is a delay before installation.

Suppose Shriya-2 plunges into unrelenting depression. She ends her life, hoping that a new Shriya-3, reinstalled from a pre-depression save point, will find a new, happier way forward. Is that suicide?

If someone kills Shriya-2, is that murder? Does it matter whether the backup was ten days ago or ten years ago?

A fire sweeps through your neighborhood. The firefighters can rescue either you and your spouse, two ordinary humans, or Shriya and Alaleh, who have backups from seven months ago. Probably they should save you and your spouse? What if the backups were from ten years ago, or from childhood?

Should healthcare be more heavily subsidized for ordinary humans that for AI persons whose maintenance is equally costly? If irreplaceable humans are always prioritized, then human irrecoverability becomes a source of privilege, and AI persons will not enjoy fully equal rights in certain respects.

How obligated are we to store the backups properly? Is this a public service that should be subsidized for less wealthy AI persons? If Dr. Evil deletes Shriya’s backup, he has surely wronged Shriya by putting her at risk, even if the backup is never needed and the deletion goes unnoticed. But how much has he wronged her, and it what way exactly? Is it similar to assault? How much does it differ from ordinary reckless endangerment? Does it depend on whether we regard Shriya-2 as the same person as the original Shriya, or as a distinct but similar successor?

What if the backup is imperfect? How much divergence in personality, values, memories, habits, and skills is tolerable before the appropriate attitude toward Shriya-2 changes -- whatever the appropriate attitude is? Small imperfections are surely acceptable. People change in small, arbitrary ways from day to day. Huge differences would presumably make it appropriate to regard the new entity as merely resembling Shriya, rather than being a restored version of her. Once again, this appears to be a matter of degree, laid uncomfortably across crude categorical properties like "same person" and "different person".

We're in unfamiliar territory, where our usual understandings of death and personal continuity no longer straightforwardly apply. If such AI systems ever come to be, we will need to develop new words, concepts, and customs.

[Data and Lore from Star Trek; image source]

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[1] Names randomly chosen from lists of former lower division students, excluding Jesus, Mohammed, and extremely unusual names.

[2] Unless humanlikeness is enforced by policy, this might not be what we should expect: See Chilson and Schwitzgebel 2026. For some puzzles about AI with different emotional ranges, see "How Much Should We Give to a Joymachine?" (Dec 24, 2025).

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Related: Weird Minds Might Destabilize Human Ethics (Aug 13, 2015).

Age and Fame in Philosophy

A philosophical discussion arc is a curve displaying how frequently a term appears in philosophical journal abstracts, titles, and keywords (compared to a representative universe of common philosophy words). A couple of weeks ago, I posted discussion arcs from the 1940s-2020s for several topics and historical philosophers.

Today, I want to use them to explore my age and fame hypothesis: that philosophers tend to have peak influence at around ages 55-70. Jerry Fodor, for example, received a lot of discussion in the early 1990s, but recently much less:

Fodor was a peaky philosopher in the following sense: His peak discussion rate (1.05%) is much higher -- 12 times higher -- than his recent discussion rate (0.09%).

John Rawls, in contrast, is considerably less peaky (so far), peaking at only 2.7 times the current rate, despite having more time to decline:

Both Fodor and Rawls peak in their late 50s, fitting the pattern I've seen in previous analyses (here and here) that philosophers tend to reach their peak influence around age 55-70.

For today's post I decided to create discussion arcs for 25 philosophers who are highly cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: twelve from the Not-So-Silent Generation in philosophy, born 1928-1945, and thirteen from the generation born 1900-1927. I chose the most SEP-cited philosophers from each generation, excluding ones whose last names generate noisy results (sorry, no David Lewis or Bernard Williams). I'll show you their discussion arcs, then do a composite analysis of discussion by age. The charts are a little crowded and blurry on some browsers; clicking on them might work to clarify and enlarge.

Here's the first group:

Some observations:

• Ayer peaks relatively early, but even so, there's significant delay between the publication of his most influential book in 1936, when we was only 26 years old, and peak discussion in the late 1950s, about twenty years later.
• Quine and Popper peak later, in the 1970s, when Quine is in his mid-60s and Popper is in his late 70s.
• All the authors are trailing off by the 2010s, though Quine, Popper, and Tarski less so than the others.

Here's a second group:

• Notice that the vertical axis for this group doesn't rise quite as high as for the previous group, so the scaling isn't the same.
• Dummett has peaks both in the late 1950s (for his early work on causation) and the early 1980s (discussing a wide range of work in metaphysics and philosophy of language).
• Although Anscombe's peak is early, in the early 1960s when she was in her early 40s, unlike any of the other authors, her discussion rate has been steadily rising over the past few decades.

Group three:

• The vertical axis for this group is still lower: Kripke at his peak wasn't as proportionally much discussed by this measure as were Quine or Rawls at their peaks. It's possible that this reflects a flaw in my method. Later in the database, abstracts are more available and longer, and although I attempted to compensate for this by comparing with search result for terms like "mind", "language", and "ethics", it's possible I overcompensated. However, it's also possible that this trend toward lower peaks with younger authors is real. As the field grew larger, there may have been less room for a few thinkers to dominate it as thoroughly.
• Kripke, Nozick, and Searle peak relatively early, compared with most philosophers I have examined -- in the 1970s, when they're in their late 30s to early 40s.
• Though Stalnaker also peaked in the late 1970s, when he was in his late 30s, like Anscombe his has risen in recent decades, and in 2021-2025 he is almost back to his earlier peak.

Finally:

• These authors have had the least time to decline from their peaks. But their discussion rates of .001 to .004 in 2021-2025 are comparable to those from earlier generations (and substantially less than Kripke and Rawls), which suggests that they might have relatively less staying power.
• You'll probably also have noticed it’s a much narrower age band than the others. There's a high density of Silent Generation philosophers cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia, for reasons I discuss here.

In the following graph, I've aggregated discussion rates by age across all of the included authors, with five-year smoothing:

Broadly in line with my previous work, the average peak is in the early 50s to the late 60s -- though as you can see from the graphs above, there's considerable individual variation. Overall, the results might trend a little bit earlier than what I've seen in other analyses, but not by much.

As I've noted elsewhere, peak influence is often a couple of decades after the thinker's most influential work. For example (besides Ayer as described above), Kuhn's and Popper's peaks in the late 1970s were 15-20 years after Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and about 20 years after the English translation of Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery.

Philosophy Should Be Among the Most Diverse Disciplines, Not the Least

Philosophy should be among the most diverse of the academic disciplines. Instead, it is among the least diverse.

Philosophical reflection is an essential part of the human condition, of interest to people of all cultures, races, classes, social groups, and body types. Who doesn’t care whether we have immaterial souls that might continue to exist after we have died, about ethical issues such as war and human rights, about what’s worth pursuing in life, about when and how far we should trust scientific authority, about the best forms of government, about the origin and structure of the world? Nothing about these issues – and nothing about philosophy as a discipline devoted to the fundamental questions of human existence – should make it of more interest to one gender rather than another, one cultural group rather than another, or to the able-bodied more than to the disabled.

Yet study after study and testimonial after testimonial show that the culturally privileged are overrepresented in academic philosophy.

[Kandinsky 1913, composition vii; image source]

For example, the self-reported gender of regular members of the American Philosophical Association in 2025 was 70% male, 29% female, and 1% nonbinary/something else. Gender balance has been improving, though slowly: In 2015, the corresponding percentages were 75%, 25%, and 0%. The pipeline into philosophy suggests that change will continue: According to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, 37% of philosophy PhD recipients in 2024 were female. Despite this qualifiedly encouraging trend, philosophy PhDs remain more male than any of the other humanities besides theology and Bible studies and more male than every social science besides economics and finance.

Black people and American Indians are especially underrepresented in U.S. philosophy, and that situation doesn’t appear to be changing at all. In 2025, 4% of regular APA members reported being Black or African American, compared with 14% of the U.S. population. The NSF data suggest no surge of new Black philosophers in the pipeline: the percentage among recent PhD recipients is also 4%. The NSF data show no American Indian or Alaskan Native philosophy PhD recipients in 2024 (though people reporting both American Indian and Hispanic or Latino identities would not appear in this category) and only one in past four years (among 1692 doctorates awarded), although Native Americans constitute nearly 2% of the U.S. population.

Another concern that has recently drawn attention is the linguistic insularity of mainstream Anglophone philosophy – that is, the neglect of work written in other languages. In 2018, three collaborators and I examined citation practices in leading Anglophone journals and found that 97% of citations referred to work originally written in English. Journals published in other languages were much less insular. We also found that 96% of the editorial board members of journals perceived as elite were housed in majority-Anglophone countries. More recently, Uwe Peters and collaborators reported that non-native English speakers face substantial difficulties publishing in English, as is now practically required for gaining an international readership.

The forthcoming book Structural Injustice in Philosophy, edited by Maeve McKeown, Seunghyun Song and Milana Kostić, further documents, and aims to explain, the exclusionary structures of philosophy, not only concerning race, gender, and language, but also class, disability, culture, mobility, sexuality, place of origin, and more.

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Could a structurally just academic system nonetheless happen to produce such skewed results, always in favor of the already powerful? Let’s not join the long string of bigots who have held that some races, languages, genders, nationalities, classes, or physical types are more intrinsically suited for philosophy than others.

It’s sometimes suggested that academic philosophy is – or is not unreasonably perceived as – a useless luxury, rightly scorned by people lacking cultural privilege. Students from less privileged backgrounds might see studying philosophy, instead of a more financially or practically rewarding discipline, as wasting a precious opportunity to achieve financial security or practical success. But even if this perception were entirely accurate – and I would argue it’s oversimplified – it wouldn’t constitute a genuine alternative to structural injustice. A society in which less privileged students feel less free to study philosophy than business or nursing is already a society with substantial injustice in higher education. The perceived impracticality of the philosophy major is a symptom and mechanism of structural injustice rather than a neutral fact. In a fair society, students who love philosophy wouldn’t be disproportionately deterred by class background.

Even in a completely just society, students and professors will not always populate each discipline in exact proportion to their background rate in the general population. Women might be drawn more to developmental psychology and men to architecture, White people to European history and Black people to African history, or whatever, for innocent reasons. It might be suggested that similarly, philosophical issues just happen to be of more interest to people from culturally powerful groups. I’ve already articulated the flaw in this argument: It strains credulity to suppose that men more than women, or White people more than Black people, or people from the United States more than people from Brazil or China, or sighted people more than blind people, would or should, in a just society, care more about truth, justice, ethics, knowledge, and the fundamental nature of reality. If anything, the opposite might be expected: Those who suffer under existing institutions should be especially motivated to think hard about the reform of those institutions and the cultural presuppositions that undergird them.

Might people from less privileged backgrounds reasonably be expected, even in a just society, to be less interested than others in academia in general, and could this explain the pattern in philosophy? Again, I see no good reason to think so and reason to think the opposite: Professorships offer good salaries (for those who escape the cycle of adjuncting) and offer unusual freedom to explore one’s interests and advocate change. People from less privileged backgrounds might be especially drawn to such opportunities – at least if the career seems genuinely open to them – more so than people from elite backgrounds with many other attractive options. In any case, if the problem were academia as such, and not philosophy in particular, we should see similar disparities across all fields. And while many historically disadvantaged groups continue to be underrepresented in many disciplines, philosophy is more imbalanced than most across a wide range of measures.

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In a just society, historically underrepresented groups and minority perspectives would be overrepresented rather than underrepresented in philosophy. Academic philosophy should celebrate diversity of opinion, encourage challenges to orthodoxy, and reward fresh perspectives from cultures and life experiences outside the mainstream. We should be eager, not reluctant, to hear from a wide range of voices. We should especially welcome, not create a chilly environment for, people with unusual or culturally atypical or historically neglected ideas, practices, and worldviews. The productive engine of philosophy depends on novelty and difference.

Philosophy is a dialectical discipline that thrives in the clash, reconciliation, and creative synthesis of diverse views; and our views are profoundly shaped by our cultural backgrounds and life experiences. Uniformity dulls our collective philosophical thinking. A fair and flourishing discipline would treasure rather than repel those who have historically been excluded. Consequently, even if every social group were proportionally represented in philosophy, we would still have reason to suspect systemic injustice. The injustices of our discipline will not be overcome until we are collectively eager to hear proportionally more from previously excluded groups than from the privileged and powerful.