Tim Bayne Co - consciousness Review of Barry Dainton

While much that is written about the unity of consciousness does, as Dainton says, traffic in vague metaphors and exaggerated claims, Dainton’s book is a superb example of sober thinking and meticulous attention to detail. Stream of Consciousness can be roughly divided into three projects, projects that are bound together by co-consciousness. In the present context ‘co-consciousness’ refers to the relation that experiences have when they are experienced together. For instance, when one experiences a pain in one’s foot while listening to music, these two experiences will typically be co-conscious parts of a single multi-modal experience, feeling-a-pain-in-one’s-foot-while-listening-to-music. Dainton’s first project (chapters 2–3) is a defence of the view that co-consciousness is a primitive, unanalysable relation. Dainton examines a number of the leading analyses of co-consciousness and finds them all wanting. Next, (chapters 5–7) Dainton defends the claim that co-consciousness accounts for the continuity of consciousness — its unity through time. A large part of this project involves developing and defending a model of the specious present. (Buried between these two projects, in chapter 4, is a tentative defence of the claim that synchronic co-consciousness is necessarily transitive: if e1 and e2 are