I thought I’d try to re-state the three types of unity in my own words, to test my understanding.
Subject unity: Are the experiences owned by the same person? Perhaps you are a different person every second, or perhaps there are two separate streams of consciousness running in your head, meaning two experiences do not have ‘subject unity’.
Representational unity: It is the case that the difference between two successive squares is always odd. Now suppose that you haven’t yet learned this fact, but I present to you two successive squares, and you notice that the difference is odd. You have a representation of the two successive squares, and the additional fact that difference is odd. Then I show you a proof that the difference between any two successive squares is odd, to the point where you understand it so intuitively that your model is now just the two squares. If I ask you if the difference is odd, you don’t even have to calculate the number, it’s just a direct function of your representation. It’s a simpler representation now. And so the odd-ness is now unified representationally with the successor-squares-ness, even though they previously used to be two separate facts.
Phenomenal unity: There are many parts that make a blues song. Certain kinds of topics and words, certain kinds of guitar and other instruments, certain ways of playing them, and certain ways of dressing while you’re singing. Each of these alone is a single experience that is not ‘1/5th of a blues song’, yet together they build a whole experience that was not contained in any single part, but in the interaction between them. The fact that they were experienced together is a fact over and above the fact that they were each experienced, and so (when experienced together) they have phenomenal unity.
I have not read much in this field before, and expect all three of my descriptions are wrong in some significant way. I wrote this comment so that someone else would have a datapoint to triangulate any misconceptions off (i..e. correcting me could help communicate the core concepts).
Edit: An actually true mathematical example for representational unity, thanks Daniel Filan.
I thought I’d try to re-state the three types of unity in my own words, to test my understanding.
Subject unity: Are the experiences owned by the same person? Perhaps you are a different person every second, or perhaps there are two separate streams of consciousness running in your head, meaning two experiences do not have ‘subject unity’.
Representational unity: It is the case that the difference between two successive squares is always odd. Now suppose that you haven’t yet learned this fact, but I present to you two successive squares, and you notice that the difference is odd. You have a representation of the two successive squares, and the additional fact that difference is odd. Then I show you a proof that the difference between any two successive squares is odd, to the point where you understand it so intuitively that your model is now just the two squares. If I ask you if the difference is odd, you don’t even have to calculate the number, it’s just a direct function of your representation. It’s a simpler representation now. And so the odd-ness is now unified representationally with the successor-squares-ness, even though they previously used to be two separate facts.
Phenomenal unity: There are many parts that make a blues song. Certain kinds of topics and words, certain kinds of guitar and other instruments, certain ways of playing them, and certain ways of dressing while you’re singing. Each of these alone is a single experience that is not ‘1/5th of a blues song’, yet together they build a whole experience that was not contained in any single part, but in the interaction between them. The fact that they were experienced together is a fact over and above the fact that they were each experienced, and so (when experienced together) they have phenomenal unity.
I have not read much in this field before, and expect all three of my descriptions are wrong in some significant way. I wrote this comment so that someone else would have a datapoint to triangulate any misconceptions off (i..e. correcting me could help communicate the core concepts).
Edit: An actually true mathematical example for representational unity, thanks Daniel Filan.