Abstract

Some philosophers have argued that so long as two neural events, within a subject, are both of the same type and both carry the same content, then these events may jointly constitute a single mental token, regardless of the sort of causal relation to each other that they bear. These philosophers have used this claim—which I call the “singularity-through-redundancy” position—in order to argue that a split-brain subject normally has a single stream of consciousness, disjunctively realized across the two hemispheres. This paper argues, against this position, that the kind of causal relations multiple neural events bear to each other constrains the mental tokens with which functionalists who are realists can identify them.