2025/09/26 by Charlotte Gauvry · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Medicine · Neuroscience · #Mental Health and Psychiatry #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments
paper · doi:10.1080/09515089.2025.2563070
openalex publication_date 2025/09/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
According to a venerable phenomenological claim which is still quite authoritative nowadays, our phenomenal field is necessarily unified at a time t. This means that everything we simultaneously experience in the first person is subjectively, representationally or at least phenomenally unified. Against this background, Tim Bayne, in his book The unity of consciousness, provides an insightful overview of the various descriptive or empirical challenges to subjective and representational unity while also demonstrating that the claim of phenomenal unity singularly resists these objections. The primary objective of my article, however, is to critically examine the robustness of the phenomenal unity claim, highlighting a specific neuro-divergent condition: “Depersonalization and Derealization Disorder.” In doing so, I aim to introduce a new argument against the phenomenal unity of consciousness. My second objective is to draw on recent empirical evidence linking DPDR symptoms to the use of virtual reality (VR) to explore whether VR could be regarded as an indirect threat to phenomenal unity.