Abstract

The notion of “phenomenal field” often occurs when philosophers attempt to characterize the unity of consciousness. The phenomenal unity relationship is distinct from the coinstantiation relation. There are grounds for supposing that experiences can be phenomenally unified in the absence of any higher‐order conscious state, and in the absence of any spatial relations of a phenomenal kind. There is a way in which phenomenal unity can be construed as a primitive feature of experience. Rather than starting off from the perspective of particular experiences and looking for what binds them into more complex states, we can start with the more complex states, and regard simpler token experiences as unified by virtue of being parts of such states. The phenomenal unity relationship can as easily be viewed as a relationship between experiential parts, as it can experiential wholes.