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The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience

A substantial philosophical literature explores the "unity of consciousness": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experiencing the taste of beer and separately experiencing the sound of music but rather having some combined experience of music-with-beer.

[illustration by Nicolas Demers, p. 218 of The Weirdness of the World] Granting this, one might suggest that we can check retrospectively, by remembering whether our experiences were unified. But retrospective reflection over such an extended time frame is epistemically dubious: subject to large distortions due to theory-ladenness, background presupposition, and memory loss. Although people seem to be pretty good at reporting the coarse-grained contents of their experiences ("I was thinking about Luz", "I was noticing that the room was kind of hot"), regarding structural features such as the amount of detail in our imagery or the bodily components of emotion, we are far from infallible -- indeed we are worse at such introspective tasks than we are at reporting similar mid-level structural features of ordinary objects in the world around us.

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