The ‘duration-blocks’ we have been dealing with latterly are unified episodes of experiencing, conceived in the Sprigge-Bradley manner, i.e. as collections of phenomenal contents that are also phenomenally unified (or experienced together). The Overlap Model can also be developed in the context of an awareness-content conception of experience, of the sort which Broad adopted. The most straightforward way of implementing this ‘awareness-overlap’ model is illustrated in Figure 13. Here A1, A2 and A3 are temporally extended acts of awareness, apprehending contents C-D, D-E and E-F respectively. Each of these acts generates a single specious present. We further suppose that these acts overlap by sharing common parts, i.e., that the portion of A1 which apprehends D is numerically identical with the portion of A2 which apprehends D, and likewise for the portions of A2 and A3 which apprehend E. Once again we have a situation in which continuous streams of consciousness are composed of overlapping specious presents.
Figure 13.
When the awareness-content conception of the specious present is developed in this manner the problems which afflicted Broad’s account no longer arise. Phenomenal continuity is secured by the overlapping of neighbouring acts of sensing (e.g., the second half of A1 and the first half of A2 are numerically identical). As Foster notes (1979), these overlaps also solve the problem of repeatedly-experienced contents. If A1 and A2 are discrete acts then D is experienced twice-over. But if A1 and A2 overlap in the manner indicated, D is experienced just once: by the episode of sensing that is common to A1 and A2.
So much for the bare bones of the Overlap version of Extensionalism. For further elaboration and discussion see Dainton (2003, 2009, 2014a, 2014b), Hoerl (2013a, 2013b), Phillips (2014c), Rashbrook (2013b), Soteriou (2010).
5.5 Problems and Prospects
The Overlap Model looks to be the most promising variant of the Extensional approach. Like other Extensional accounts, it allows change and succession to be directly experienced in a clear and unambiguous manner, and so fully satisfies the requirements of realism. Also, by virtue of the fact that each successive phase of an Extensional specious present contains ordinary first-order experiences, the requirements of the Immediacy Thesis are also met: change and succession can be experienced with maximal (phenomenal) vividness. Further, and distinctively, the Overlap Model secures both Modest and Strong Continuity: not only is a (typical) stream of consciousness a gap-free stretch of experience, but each of its successive brief phases is experientially connected to its immediate neighbours. Kelly (2005: 231) points out that for the Extensional approach to be viable it must be able to explain how we manage to perceive continuous changes which last longer than the specious present, which in turn requires an explanation of how it is possible for specious presents to be strung together; he also suggests no such explanation is available. The Overlap approach provides just such an explanation.
Despite this, some critics have suggested the overlap mechanism is surplus to requirements. Gallagher (2003) is unable to find any trace of the alleged overlaps between specious presents in his own experience, and concludes that the account is phenomenologically suspect. The Overlap theorist can respond by arguing that the seamless continuity, lasting for minutes or hours, that we find in our streams of consciousness is itself evidence for the proposed overlap structure, since the latter is responsible for the continuity in question:
Suppose you hear a succession A-B-C; you hear A-running-into-B, and B-running-into-C. Since you hear [B] only once, we can immediately conclude that the experiencing of [B] in the earlier phenomenal present is numerically identical with the experiencing of [B] in the later phenomenal present, and hence that you have just experienced two phenomenal presents that overlapped by virtue of possessing a common part. This identity not just a reasonable inference, it is directly apprehended: the [B] that you experience [A] running-into is one and the same experience as the [B] that you experience running-into [C]. This overlap structure is not, I concede, immediately obvious. We find it most natural to think of ourselves as simply experiencing A-flowing-into-B-flowing-into-C. The fact that this extended experience consists of overlapping phenomenal presents only becomes apparent after some reflection and introspective experimentation, but once thus equipped, the existence of overlap- structures within our ordinary experience becomes obvious. More generally, if we accept the overlap model, then we are all continually aware of experiential overlaps, for it is these overlaps which are directly responsible for the experienced continuity of our streams of consciousness. (Dainton 2003: §6)
If these claims are true, the Extensional model (in its Overlap mode) has secure foundations. But are they? Strawson (2009: Part 5) argues, in effect, that direct experiential connections between successive stream-phases are invisible to introspection; for further discussion see Dainton (2004: §4).
In a different vein, Mabbot argues that ‘qualitative differences of content alone determine sub-divisions within our continuous experience’(1951: 166). Finding this plausible, Phillips (2010: 189) suggests that the overlap theory ‘looks like unwholesome food served to a man already full’. Overlap theorists will agree that content does indeed provide a way of demarcating subdivisions within streams – the period spent listening to the sound of a passing plane, or watching a bird fly across the sky, etc. – but they will insist that an additional ingredient is required. We need to be able to explains why it is that we are only directly aware of change and persistence over short intervals, rather than the several hours through which a typical stream of consciousness extends. By holding that the diachronic co-consciousness relationship only extends for a short interval the Overlap theorist can meets this need. In the Overlap Model inherently dynamic contents and the limited span of the diachronic co-consciousness relationship work together in delivering (what is arguably) a phenomenologically realistic result.
Other criticisms are directed at the Extensional specious present. One main issue here concerns phenomenal unity. As we saw in §2.5, Meinong (1899: 187) pointed out a potential difficulty with Stern’s temporally extended ‘presence-time’ (in effect, an Extensionalist specious present). If a specious present extends through (ordinary) time, the parts or phases of which it is composed – let us designate them [P1, P2, P3 … Pn] – will also be distributed through time. The question then arises as to what unifies these components. If nothing unifies them, we are left with a succession experiences, but no experience of succession. We could hold that [P1, P2, P3 … Pn] are unified because they fall within the scope of a single episode of awareness A, but if we also hold that A is extended through ordinary time, the original problem simply re-occurs: A will be composed of a succession of phases, [A1, A2, A3 … An], and unless these phases are themselves unified, we will once again be left with a mere succession of experiencings. To avoid this we might posit a higher-order act awareness, A*, which takes [A1, A2, A3 … An] and their contents its objects, and in so doing creates an experience of succession. But if we suppose that A* is a temporally extended episode of awareness, then evidently we have solved nothing – what unifies the component parts of A*? – and are embarked on a menacing-looking infinite regress. Happily, there is a simple and obvious way to avoid this regress: we need simply hold that the awareness A which unifies [P1, P2, P3 … Pn] itself lacks temporal extension. If A is strictly momentary, the problem of what unifies its constituent phases simply does not arise: it lacks such phases entirely.
This influential line of argument leads directly to PSA, and thence to the associated Retentional model of temporal consciousness. Although the difficulty may seem serious, the Extensional theorist has an effective line of reply: the argument in question can be seen as simply begging the question. Recall the way in which the Extensional theorist construes an individual specious present, as depicted in Figures 5 and 6: a single specious present is viewed as a temporal spread of contents that are all experienced together, i.e., that are diachronically co-conscious. Right at the heart of the Extensional model is an assumption concerning the nature of phenomenal unity. The assumption is precisely that phenomenal unity is not confined to contents that are momentary and simultaneous, it can embrace contents that are spread (a short distance) through time. Accordingly, provided the envisaged succession of phases [P1, P2, P3 … Pn] are related in this manner – they are diachronically co-conscious, and so are experienced together – they already constitute an experience of succession, and nothing further is required. Now it could be that the Extensional theorists are misguided in making this assumption: perhaps phenomenal unity cannot extend over time in the way they claim. But since the line of argument set out in the previous paragraph simply ignores the mode of phenomenal unity posited by Extensional model theorists, it fails to provide us with any reason for thinking this is the case. In effect, the objection presupposes that that synchronic phenomenal unity – the sort of unity which obtains among simultaneous momentary contents – is the only mode of phenomenal unity.
Since Extensional specious presents comprise earlier and later phases that are experienced together, in a single unified (albeit extended) state of consciousness, it may well be that Extensional models are incompatible with the Presentist conception of time, according to which only what is present is real. For two phenomenal contents C1 and C2 be experienced together, to be diachronically co-conscious, both C1 and C2 must surely both exist. But if Presentism were true, when C1 is present C2 would be non-existent, and when C2 is present C1 would be non-existent. Extensional theorists will not be overly worried by this consequence, which they will construe as a reason for rejecting the Presentist conception of time. See §7.2 for further discussion of this issue.
Coming from a very different direction, Grush has argued (2005b, 2006, 2007, 2016) that Retentional models have a distinct advantage over Extensional models when it comes to accommodating certain ‘temporal illusions’. The relevant category of cases are those where a stimuli occurring later than a time t affects the character of what is perceived as occurring at t itself; the so-called flash-lag effect and the phi-phenomenon fall into this category. These instances of (apparent) retro-active causation are only found occurring over brief intervals, but they are certainly as puzzling as they are intriguing. Grush suggests that Retentional models can handle such cases by virtue of the fact that what is perceived as occurring at t need not remain constant from one specious present to another. So, for example, a particular spot of light might be perceived as motionless in a specious present S1 occurring very shortly after t, and that same spot might be perceived as being in motion in a later specious present S2. This option is not available to Extensional theorists – since on this view the spot is represented just once – and as a consequence there will be conflicting perceptual experiences of what is occurring at t: the spot will be perceived (impossibly) as both stationary and in motion. However, there are replies available to the Extensional theorist. It takes some time for our perceptual systems to produce an experience in response to a stimuli; perhaps our perceptual systems make use of this time to work out (as it were) a single coherent response to ambiguous or conflicting stimuli. Accordingly, rather than the spot’s being experienced as both stationary and as moving, it is experienced just the once, in motion. For more on the relevant illusions, Grush’s argument, and the responses available to the Extensionalist see Section 3 of the supplementary document Husserl, the Brain and Cognitive Science, and the supplementary document Interpreting Temporal Illusions.
Still more recently, Pelczar has argued (2010a, 2010b) that the Extensional model rests on an inadequate conception of the temporal microstructure of consciousness. An Extensional specious present is a chunk of experiencing which extends over a second or so of ordinary time, so it will inevitably possesses temporal parts – the still briefer chunks of experiencing of which it is composed – and the briefest of these parts will be strictly momentary episodes of experiencing. Since on the Extensional model it takes an interval of time to experience change or succession, these momentary stream-phases will not contain any experience of change: their contents will be entirely static in character. This is problematic, argues Pelczar, because we have good reason to believe it is impossible for such experiences to exist. The grounds for this are phenomenological: ‘When I have an experience as of some smooth continuous change – when watching a leaf drift to the ground, for example, or listening to a steadily rising tone – my experience does not contain or decompose into a series of experiences that are not as of change’ (forthcoming A). Since the briefest of experiences that we can conceive or imagine contains some element of change, or passage – or so Pelczar maintains – we should accept that experience is essentially dynamic, or better: subjectively dynamic. Since the momentary episodes of experience which feature in the Extensional model do not feature change, it seems that Extensional specious presents are composed of ingredients which cannot possibly exist. Retentionalist accounts do not face this difficulty. A Retentionalist specious present is momentary episode of experiencing whose contents are (by hypothesis) subjectively dynamic.
If this reasoning is sound, it looks as though we have good reason for preferring the Retentional model to the Extensional alternative. However, there are replies available to the Extensionalist. One option is to hold grant that phenomenal contents are essentially (subjectively) dynamic, but hold that the briefest genuine episodes of experiencing in a specious present (or stream of consciousness) have a finite temporal extension; on this view momentary cross-sections of a stream of consciousness are no more than abstractions. A second option is to reject the claim that phenomenal contents are essentially dynamic. We may not be able to imagine experiential contents that are entirely static, but this doesn’t mean they are not possible: perhaps our imaginations are incapable of recreating all possible modes of experience. A third, and more intriguing option, is to accept that experience is essentially dynamic, and also accept that a stream can decompose into ever briefer parts, but reject the assumption that this decomposition must terminate in durationless episodes of experience. An alternative possibility is that the decomposition continues indefinitely – to infinity – without ever terminating in durationless point-like parts. In contemporary parlance, perhaps consciousness has the structure of atomless gunk. This species of gunk is a sort of stuff that is infinitely divisible, but not possessing point-like parts: all the parts of a portion of gunk have proper parts, without end. Whitehead and Broad were of the view that ordinary space and time possessed this structure. Irrespective of whether they were right about this, it may be that our streams of consciousness have this structure. If so, then they can possess an infinite number of parts, all of which have some (usually very brief) duration, and each of these parts may have a dynamic content. Wherever the truth lies on this issue, the temporal microstructure of experience looks to be fertile ground for Extensionalist exploration.
For discussion of some further issues relating to the Extensional specious present see the supplementary document The Specious Present: Further Issues.
6. Retentional Models
Having looked in some detail at two of the main forms of PT-realism – the Cinematic approach (in §4.1) and the Extensional model (in §5) – there remains the third: the Retentional model. Although the Retentional model itself comes in several variants, its proponents share a distinctive conception of the structure of temporal consciousness. Whereas Extensional theorists hold that our immediate experience of change and succession occurs within specious presents which are themselves extended through time, Retentional theorists hold that individual specious presents lack temporal duration, but have contents which succeed in presenting (or representing) temporally extended phenomena. As standardly conceived, a Retentionalist specious present consists of a complex of experiential contents, comprising an instantaneous (or near-instantaneous) phase of immediate experience, together with a collection of representations – retentions – of the recent past, all packaged into an episode of experiencing that is momentary; a stream of consciousness is composed of a continuum of these momentary episodes.[18]
In effect, whereas Extensional specious presents run horizontally along the time-line, Retentional specious presents stands vertically, at right-angles to it. On the face of it the Extensional approach is the more natural way for a realist to go: the most obvious and straightforward explanation of how we can be directly aware of change and persistence is to hold that our direct awareness can span an interval of ordinary time. By contrast, the Retentional view can seem almost perverse: why think that our apparently immediate experience of change and persistence is in fact packaged into momentary (or extremely brief) slices of experience? Since it is by no means obvious how this can be, Retentionalism is not the obvious way to go. Yet a good many of the most famous names associated with the specious present – James (at times), Husserl, Broad (in his later work on the topic) – have opted for the Retentional approach. Before looking at Retentional models in more detail, it is worth pausing to consider the motivations which have led such philosophers to move in this direction.
6.1 Retentional Models: Motivations
Why think our experience of change occurs in experiences which are themselves durationless? There are a number of considerations which point in this direction; some of these we have already encountered, others we have not.
For the Retentional model to be viable at all, we must be able to make sense of the idea that duration and succession, in the forms we immediately experience them, can be contained in episodes of experiencing that are themselves without duration. Provided one draws some relevant distinctions, this is by no means as impossible as it might initially seem. The three letters ‘R E D’ can represent red without themselves being red; and the same applies, mutatis mutandis, for ‘L O U D’ and ‘S Q U A R E’. Generally speaking, the properties of a representation (that which is doing the representing) and the content of that representation (what is represented) can differ dramatically. The distinction extends to mental representations: the conscious thought ‘the Earth’s equator is circular’ succeeds in representing the geometrical property of circularity without itself possessing this property. Bearing this in mind, there is no obvious reason why the temporal properties of a mental representation R need entirely coincide with the temporal properties of the content C carried by R. Accordingly, in a more extreme case, it may be possible for a content C to have an apparent duration of a second or so, whereas R exists in an episode of experiencing which has no significant duration at all. As Hoerl (2013(a) argues, Retentionalists such as Meinong and Husserl were well aware of the need to distinguish between the temporal properties featuring in the contents of experience, from the temporal properties of the experiences carrying these contents. See §7.1 for more on this distinction; see Rashbrook (2013a) for more in its role in motivating Retentionalism.
As for the question of motivation, common sense no doubt plays a role. Reid’s contention (see §2.3) that ‘the senses give us information of things only as they exist in the present moment’ has a good deal of intuitive plausibility, as does taking the present moment to lack duration, in the manner of Augustine. Anyone who subscribes to each of these doctrines and who also believes we are immediately aware of change has little option but to opt for the Retentional approach. Tradition is another likely reason. As we saw in §2.4, in his First Critique Kant maintained that we could only have experience of the sort we have if at every moment we also retain something of our prior experience: ‘if I were always to lose the preceding representations (the first parts of the line, the preceding parts of the time, or the successively represented unity) from my thoughts, and not reproduce them when I proceed to the following ones, then no whole representation and none of the previously mentioned thoughts, not even the purest and most fundamental representations of space and time, could ever arise.’ (A102) For philosophers working within the Kantian and Post-Kantian tradition – and this includes the majority of European phenomenologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – it would be natural to start from the assumption that our experience of change and persistence arises from a combination of two factors: a momentary phase of present experience and simultaneously apprehended reproductions or retentions of just-past experiences.
Many realists have no doubt found the Retentional approach appealing because it offers a simple and intuitively satisfying explanation of how an experience of succession differs from a mere succession of experiences: in the former case, the contents forming the succession are presented together, as an ensemble, to a single momentary awareness. Brentano and Husserl both subscribed to The Principle of Simultaneous Awareness (PSA) ‘No succession of awarenesses – no matter how close together in time they come – can, by itself, account for an awareness of succession; it must be the case that an awareness of succession derives from simultaneous features of the structure of that awareness’ (Miller (1984: 109). As we saw in §5.5, Meinong and Husserl both argued – correctly – that the successive phases of a temporally extended awareness of the sort advocated by Stern needed to be unified, and both realized that a unifying act which is not temporally extended does not face the same difficulty. Indeed, it may well be that some theorists, consciously or unconsciously, have found the Retentional approach appealing because of the way it (in effect) reduces the problem of diachronic phenomenal unity to the comparatively straightforward problem of synchronic unity. Although the latter is by no means unproblematic – there are different accounts of it – it is at least widely accepted that there is such a thing as synchronic phenomenal unity.
A further, and no less deep, motivation for the Retentional view is connected with the common sense considerations mentioned above: tacit assumptions, of a broadly metaphysical character, concerning the structure or nature of time itself are very relevant in this context. There may well be no single conception of time which perfectly fits all our common sense assumptions about it, but Presentism – the doctrine, favoured by Augustine, that neither the past nor the future exist, and hence that only the present is real – fits them better than most. If the momentary present is all that is real, there is no obvious option but to locate our experience of change and persistence in the momentary present. (The relationship between different conceptions of temporal consciousness and different ways of thinking about time per se is the topic of §7.2 below.)
A similar conclusion can be reached without recourse to highly controversial conceptions of time. Russell once wrote ‘There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times’ (1921: 159). If the world could have sprung into existence five minutes ago, why not five seconds, or five nano-seconds ago? The claim that the subjective character of our current experience is logically independent of the past can seem eminently plausible. But so too can the claim that the character of our current experience is logically independent of the future. Suppose five seconds from now I were to be instantaneously annihilated by a nuclear bomb concealed under my chair. Would this fact impinge on my current experience? It seems unlikely – how can something that is yet to happen affect what is happening now? But doesn’t the same apply if I will be annihilated a mere five nano-seconds from now? It seems plausible to think that it does. This reasoning leads ineluctably to the conclusion that the character of our experience at any one time is logically independent of our past and future experiences, and this applies to every part of every stream of consciousness. If this is the case, our experience of change and persistence cannot essentially depend on experiential connections between the neighbouring phases of our streams of consciousness, connections of the sort Extensional models posit and require: for if such connections were to exist, adjoining stream-phases would not be logically independent of one another. And if adjoining momentary stream phases are logically independent of one another, it may well be that the Retentional approach is the only game in town.
6.2 The Retentional Specious Present: challenges and variations
Let us suppose that for the past minute or so you have just been watching the pointer moving around a dial; the pointer has been moving sufficiently quickly that you are able to see it in motion. Let us further suppose that your experience of change is occurring within the confines of a succession of specious presents, and that each of the latter consists of a momentary phase of perceptual experience together with a sequence of retentions of recent experiences. For present purposes, we can think of retentions as a special form of past-directed mental representations that are triggered in an automatic (and involuntary) manner after each momentary phase of experiencing. This basic Retentional model is depicted in Figure 14.
Figure 14.
In the bottom row of the diagram are three momentary perceptual experiences, registering the location of the pointer at three neighbouring times. For convenience, only a small selection of such experiences have been shown; we can suppose that in reality you enjoyed a distinct momentary experience for (at least) each discernibly distinct location of the pointer as it moved from the half-past position to the quarter-to position. The vertical column to the right depicts a single specious present, S. This has two sorts of component: a momentary visual experience of the dial-face (with the pointer at quarter-to); accompanying the latter (and co-conscious with it) are retentions of the earlier experiences, shown unshaded and in dotted outline. Again, only a few of the actual retentions are shown in the diagram: in reality there will be a retention corresponding to each of the momentary perceptual experiences you enjoyed during this brief interval. We are to suppose that your direct experience of change – in this case visible movement – takes place exclusively within these vertical structures.
So much for the basics of the Retentional model. Might experiential structures of this sort be responsible for our immediate experience of change and persistence? Perhaps, but there are a number of hurdles which must be crossed or circumvented.
For a Retentional model to amount to a viable form of PT-realism it must be possible for momentary states such as S to include change, succession and persistence in the forms in which we experience them. One difficulty here is the Retentional Simultaneity Problem noted in §3. The contents in any given Retentional specious present exist simultaneously – at least as measured by ordinary clock-time – but if they are to generate the appearance of succession they must avoid leaving the impression that the events they represent also occur simultaneously. If a number of tones are heard simultaneously, the result is obviously a chord rather than a succession. In fact, it is not just succession that the Retentional theorist needs to accommodate. Returning to Figure 14, it was stipulated that you see the pointer moving smoothly from half-past to quarter-to. Where is the movement in S? There may seem to be no real difficulty here: after all, we can easily call up a moving image in our memories or imaginations – as when we remember seeing a bird in flight, or a ball in motion – so we know that our minds are capable of generating dynamic imagery. There is, however, an important difference between the two cases. Running re-plays of past experiences in ordinary memory is a process which itself unfolds over time, but the dynamic re-plays required by the Retentionalist are supposed to occur at a single moment. Indeed, as processes which occur over time, remembered or imagined movements will themselves occur within momentary specious presents, and so their dynamic character will depend on that of retentions.
Given the requirements of realism, what characteristics must retentions themselves possess? Retentions are akin to memories in that they re-present the past, but to fulfil the task required of them they must be more vivid than ordinary memories. We all know what it is like to call up a memory of seeing and hearing the falling of a tree; we all know what it is like to actually see and hear the falling of a tree. In the case of the former there is a visual and acoustic mental images. In the latter case there is the immediately perceived motion and noise: sharp, vivid – LOUD – and out there. Between these two forms of experience there is all the difference in the world. Since it is not plausible to suppose that ordinary memory-images are responsible for our immediate experience of change, retentions must be a of a distinctive (and not commonly recognised) form of experience.
Diagrams along the lines of 6.1 are commonplace in the Retentionalist literature, and all such figures serve the useful purpose of making it clear that Retentionalist are offering what is, in effect, a two-dimensional model of temporal consciousness. The change and succession which feature in our immediate experience occur within specious presents which have no temporal extension in ordinary objective time; these specious presents do possess a temporal extension – an experienced extension – but this exists (as it were) orthogonally to ordinary time, along the vertical rather than the horizontal. Opting for a two-dimensional temporal framework is an elegant solution to the problem of how it is possible for succession and persistence to exist in experiences which (objectively) have no duration, but is also a source of potential difficulties. Since Extensional models do not require the positing of this additional dimension, Retentional models are vulnerable to the accusation that they are needlessly profligate.
The additional dimension also creates a problem on the purely phenomenological level. There are two general options concerning the subjective character of Retentional specious presents, we can call them the Modal and Non-Modal, see Figure 15. Modal theorists, such as Brentano and Husserl, hold that the successive contents within a single specious present appear under different temporal modes of presentation: roughly speaking, whereas some contents appear as fully present, others as ‘just past’, others as ‘more past’, and so on. These temporal modes do not figure in any shape or form on the Non-modal option: on this view, all the contents within a single specious present appear equally present, in the phenomenal sense, as well as successive. In effect, the Retentionalist Non-modal specious present is subjectively indistinguishable from an Extensionalist duration-block (see §5.1), it is simply differently located with respect to ordinary time. See Lee (2014a, 2014b) for a vigourous recent defence of a Non-Modal form of Retentionalism.
Figure 15. Two conceptions of the Retentionalist specious present.
The Non-Modal option has the advantage of ensuring that Retentionalist specious presents feature change and succession with maximal phenomenal immediacy – important for those who subscribe to the Immediacy Thesis (see §3) – but it also brings a serious disadvantage. To bring this out, let us suppose a single specious present has an apparent duration of around one second, e.g., enough to encompass two brief tones ‘do-re’. Since Retentionalist specious presents supposedly form a close-packed continuum, over a period of (say) ten seconds of ordinary objective clock-time, we will be experiencing content with a subjective duration of vastly more than one minute. To simplify, if we suppose there are a hundred specious presents per objective second, in a ten second interval we will enjoy experiences with an apparent duration of 1000 seconds – enough (apparent) time to hear ‘do-re’ a thousand times. Non-Modal versions of Retentionalism thus suffer from a serious problem with surplus content: they generate more experience (or more phenomenal content) than it is plausible to suppose actually occurs over a given interval of experiencing. For diverging views as to the seriousness of this problem see Phillips (2010), Lee (2014b), Dainton (2014), Pelczar (2015) and Grush (2016).
Many Retentional theorists have eschewed the Non-Modal option in favour of the Modal alternative. Since on this view only a small portion of a single specious present is experienced as fully present, the problem of surplus content is greatly diminished. The adoption of temporal modes also offers a promising-looking solution the Retentional Simultaneity problem: by virtue of appearing under different temporal modes, the contents of a single specious present will not seem to be simultaneous, even if this is what they are, objectively speaking. As for how temporal modes are to be conceived, Retentional theorists have outlined a variety of proposals.
6.2.1 Broad’s Later View
In his Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy (1938, vol.2) Broad expounds an account of temporal consciousness which is seemingly at odds with his earlier theory (see §5.3). First of all, he no longer subscribes to the view that momentary acts of awareness (or ‘prehensions’ in the McTaggart terminology) are fictions: the new account is built on them. The second main change is that Broad no longer allows momentary acts to extend a short distance through ordinary time: he now holds that they are confined to single moments. He thus trades in his previous (partial) Extensionalism for a Retentional model. The third new ingredient is the property of presentedness. This, claims Broad, is a ‘psychological’ (or phenomenal) feature which all phenomenal contents possess to some degree. Different degrees of presentedness are correlated with differences in apparent temporal location, with contents possessing a high intensity of presentedness seeming more present (or less past) than those which possess it to a lesser degree. On Broad’s new view, a single specious present can be conceived along the lines shown in Figure 16.
Figure 16. Broad’s later conception of the specious present.
How does the property of presentedness work? How does one phenomenal characteristic manage to make one or more other phenomenal characteristics appear to be less than wholly present? The question is of interest because the only obvious way of construing ‘different degrees of presentedness’ is in terms of different degrees of Humean force and vivacity: a memory-image of a red balloon could easily be described as seeming ‘less present’ in this sense than a perceptual experience of a red balloon. But thus construed presentedness fails to do the job required: the upper parts of the specious present depicted in Figure 16 evidently possess less force and vivacity than those lower down, but they don’t seem in the least less present (in the temporal sense) as a result. Since Broad is silent on this issue, he presumably takes presentedness to be a primitive property, whose character and mode of functioning cannot usefully be elucidated. Nonetheless, it remains mysterious how any phenomenal property could do the work required.
6.2.2 Brentano
Brentano has rather more to say on this issue. We saw earlier (§2.4) that Brentano was the first to expound a Modal Retentional model in any detail, and that his views went through several changes. Initially he sought to explain the difference between present sensations and proteraestheses (in effect, retentions) in terms of different kinds of experiential objects: he held that proteraestheses are composed of intentionally unreal objects that are apprehended under a ‘modifying attribute’ of a (certain degree) of pastness. He came to view this as an error, in part because he believed past, present and future form a continuum, a view which is difficult to hold onto if present experiences are real, and past and future ones are not. In later writings he suggested that the difference between the contents of an ordinary sensation and a proteraesthesis is to be located in the way we are aware of them. He first explicated these differences in temporal modes in terms of differences in judgement : a represented content a is judged be past to a certain degree, a content b is judged to be past to a greater degree, and so forth. In a further change of view he rejected judgements in favour of temporal modes of presentation: sensory objects can be apprehended as past to differing degrees. In his essay ‘Our intuition of Time is a Continuum of Modes of Presentation and Acceptance’ he writes:
When that which was first of all given as present appears as more and more past it is not other objects which are accepted as existing, but the same objects which are accepted in a different way, with a different modus of acceptance … only someone capable of a presenting with different modes and of a continuously changing mode of presentation can have a presentation of rest and motion, of continuing to exist or of proceeding in time. (1988: 79, 82)
Thus in Brentano’s mature account of the Retentional specious present, alterations in contents themselves – a mechanism similar to that proposed by Broad – have given way to alterations in the way contents are experienced, and these ways of experiencing are to be viewed as basic modes of consciousness.
This change of stance was accompanied by a further significant evolution in doctrine. Brentano subscribed to a two-component conception of consciousness: in perceiving an object, we are aware not only of the object presented in perception, but also of our perceiving of that object. Hence in any perceptual act, e.g. the hearing of a tone C, there are two ingredients: the primary object of the act, the tone C, and the secondary object, which in this case is the hearing of C. In virtue of this two-fold structure, consciousness at a given moment of time is always accompanied by a form of self-consciousness. But what of the diachronic case? Does this mode of self-consciousness extend over time? Brentano’s views on this also underwent changes. On his early ‘object modification’ view, he held that the primary object of a proteraesthesis is an earlier act of experiencing: e.g., a past sensing of tone C, rather than C itself. In virtue of this, we have a continuous awareness of our own conscious acts over time as well as at a time, although the mechanism in the diachronic case (involving primary objects) differs from that which operates in the synchronic case (which relies on secondary objects). However, Brentano came to regard this as a mistake, and in his mature ‘temporal mode of presentation’ account, the primary object of the proteraesthesis is no longer the act of sensing C, but C itself, albeit presented under the mode of ‘having occurred in the past’.
The reasoning behind this shift in position sheds useful light on the motives which move Retentional theorists. Brentano believed that while we can never know with certainty that primary objects of consciousness exist, we can know with certainly that secondary objects exist, and are as they appear. Accordingly, if the secondary object of a proteraesthesis were a just-past act of sensing, we could know with certainty that we ourselves, as the subject of that act, existed a few moments ago. But Brentano held that we have no such knowledge: it is logically possible that we have only just now come into existence. By making the primary object the past tone, rather than the sensing of this tone, the unwanted consequence is averted. For further detail see Chisholm (1981), Albertazzi 1999 (59–65), Krauss (1976), Moran (1996).
6.2.3 Husserl
We saw in §2.7 that for Husserl the specious present (or in his terminology, the ‘original temporal field’ or ‘living present’) is a tripartite episode of experiencing consisting of three ingredients: momentary primal impressions, a continuum of retentions (or ‘primary memories’), and forward looking protentions (a distinctive kind of expectation). On the important question of the nature of retentions, Husserl’s views changed significantly over the many years during which he wrestled with these matters – his notes and sketches suggest he never found an account he was entirely happy with.
In the 1904–5 lectures, Husserl finds Brentano’s early account of time-consciousness – problematic on several counts. As Husserl interprets him, Brentano construed retentions as a distinctive kind of mental representation – or ‘phantasm’ – imbued with a modifying temporal attribute: pastness. Husserl discerns a fatal tension here: retentional contents are presently occurring sensory items in consciousness, but according to Brentano, they also supposed to be ‘unreal’, by virtue of appearing as past. How can numerically the same content be real and unreal, present and past? Husserl also finds it ‘most extraordinary that Brentano does not take into consideration the difference between the perception of time and the phantasy of time’ (1991: 17) In effect, the charge is that by building retentions out of mental images generated by the imagination, Brentano is unable to do adequate justice to the perceptual character of our temporal awareness – here Husserl’s starting point is the realist claim that change and succession are seen and heard, not merely imagined or inferred.
Husserl himself thought it appropriate to regard retentions as akin to memories, but memories of a distinctive or ‘primary’ kind: ordinary memories, or recollections, he refers to as ‘secondary memory’. Earlier, in the Principles, James had drawn a similar distinction, which he explained thus:
An object which is recollected, in the proper sense of the term, is one which has been absent from consciousness altogether, and now revives anew. It is brought back, fished up, so to speak, from a reservoir in which, with countless other objects, it lay buried and lost from view. But an object of primary memory is not thus brought back; it never was lost; its date was never cut off in consciousness from that of the immediately present moment. In fact it comes to us as belonging to the rearward portion of the present space of time, and not to the genuine past. (1890: 646–7)
James went on to suggest primary memories are akin to reverberations or after-images, that are triggered by ordinary perceptions. Husserl is in full agreement with James’ claim that retentions differ from ordinary memories in this respect: they are not re-presentations, since a retained content has never been absent from consciousness. A further difference is that ordinary memories are under the control of the will, whereas retentions are not. However, Husserl thought it a mistake to suppose that retentions are remotely akin to echoes or reverberations. He fully accepts that echoes and the like are to be found in consciousness, but they are contents of a perfectly ordinary kind perceptual kind: they are experiences which reveal to us what is going on around us at the present time. Retentions, by contrast, although they exist alongside presently occurring perceptual contents, reveal the past. For this reason retentional consciousness is ‘an original consciousness’ – a distinctive sui generis mode of experience, quite unlike any other:
Retentional consciousness really contains consciousness of the past of the tone, primary memory of the tone, and must not be divided into sensed tone and apprehension as memory. Just as a phantasy-tone is not a tone but the phantasy of the tone … so too the tone primarily remembered in intuition is something fundamentally and essentially different from the perceived tone … (1991: 34)
Husserl is vulnerable to the charge that he characterizes retention primarily in terms of how it is different from other modes of consciousness – recollection, imagination, and so forth – and there is some truth in this: we do not get a truly informative account of how retention manages to present in the past in a perceptual way. In response, Husserl might reasonable point out that this is only to be expected, if, as he maintains, retention is a sui generis mode of experience.
In subsequent writings Husserl experimented with several different ways of conceiving of retentions – see Kortooms (2002) and de Warren (2009) for a full picture – but one development is of particular significance. In his early lectures, although it is not always evident from the lectures themselves, it seems that Husserl conceived of retentions in terms of a general conception of perceptual experience that he had developed earlier, in his Logical Investigations. According to this ‘apprehension-content’ scheme, retentions – like all forms of perceptual consciousness – are real sensory-like contents in experience, contents that are animated by an act of apprehension, and thus seem a certain degree past. In the years following the 1906–7 period, Husserl came to think that it was wrong to apply the apprehension-content scheme to retentions.
A normal perceptual content, such as a cloud-shaped white patch, can end up being perceived very differently: for example, we might see it as an actual cloud, or as merely part of a picture of a cloud – such cases can legitimately be viewed as instances of ‘primary’ (sensory) contents being apprehended in different ways. Husserl came to doubt whether temporal appearances of a content can vary in this sort of way: ‘The primary contents that spread out in the now are not able to switch their temporal function: the now cannot stand before me as the not-now, the not-now cannot stand before me as the now’ (1991: 334). He continues: ‘Can a series of coexistent primary contents ever bring a succession to intuition? Can a series of simultaneous red-contents ever bring a duration of red, of a tone c, and the like, to intuition? Is that possible as a matter of principle?’ (1991: 335) Husserl now finds it is absurd to suppose that qualitatively identical contents can appear as both simultaneous and successive, depending merely on how they are apprehended.
Since these difficulties arise because retentional contents are being conceived as sensory-like items, present in consciousness, the solution might be to find a different way of thinking of retentional contents, and this is what Husserl does:
The still living tone, the tone ‘still’ standing in the view of the temporal intuition, no longer exists; and what pertains to its appearance is not a ‘tone-sensation’ (an actually present now) but an ‘echo’ of the sensation, a modification that is no longer a primary content in the sense of something actually present (not an immanent tone-now). On the contrary, it is something modified: a consciousness of past sensation. In this consciousness, however, no actual tone can be found, only a tone that has been. (1991: 336)
On this new view – modelled on his later understanding of phantasy-experience – retentions are intentional ‘through and through’: they do not have sensory-like content in the manner of properly perceptual experience. But while this may help with some difficulties, it gives rise to new ones. Recalling Husserl’s own critique of Brentano, one might wonder whether a specious present filled with purely intentional entities can supply us with the properly perceptual experience of change and succession that realism demands.
6.3 The Retentional Stream of Consciousness
Providing a credible account of the character and composition of individual specious presents is only the first stage in the development of a viable form of Retentional realism. The second stage is providing a credible account of how individual specious presents combine and interact to form our streams of consciousness. Here there is a good deal of agreement between Retentional theorists, as well as some variation. The basics of Brentano’s account were presented in §2.4. For Brentano a stream of consciousness simply takes the form of a dense (or gap-free) succession of momentary specious presents: see the diagram of hearing a melody depicted in Figure 2. In his later writings Broad adopted a similar approach, as shown in Figure 17.
Figure 17. Broad’s later account.
The bottom line represents a continuous stretch of sensory experience, a continuous auditory tone, let’s suppose. This stretch of experience is apprehended by dense succession of momentary acts, represented by the full-length vertical lines. (Only a three of these are shown here, in reality there would be an infinity of them.) Focus first on D and the vertical line standing on it: D-A***. This line represents the content apprehended by the momentary act occurring at D, and hence a single specious present. This act’s content represents the tone segment A-D, but the act does not embrace the entirety of A-D itself – we are no longer dealing with acts of awareness which reach back to the recent past. Instead, the act apprehends a content possessing parts which seem more and more past (or less and less present) as we move from D to A***. In the figure, the greater the number of asterisks affixed to a content, the less presentedness it possesses. Hence the same tone-segments occur in successive specious presents with smoothly decreasing degrees of presentedness. If we simplify by first considering momentary tone-phases, the phase at A is experienced as A* in the specious present at B, as A** in the specious present at C and finally as A*** in the specious present at D. In a similar way, D is experienced as D* in the specious present occurring at E, and then as D** in specious present occurring at F. Extended tone-segments (e.g. B-C) behave in the same manner, being experienced as B**-C* (at D) and B***-C** (at E).[19]
Broad’s account explains how it is possible for temporally extended contents to be apprehended as wholes (provided they fall within the span of the specious present) and also be experienced as smoothly sinking into the past. But while these are definite advantages, there is a question mark over whether Broad successfully secures the continuity of consciousness. Modest Continuity (see §3) poses him no difficulty: by virtue of being dense, the envisaged succession of momentary specious presents will constitutes a stream of consciousness which is free from gaps. But if Broad’s model is to conform to the Strong Continuity Thesis, neighbouring stream phases must be experientially connected to one another. In the absence of such connections – or so the proponents of the Strong Thesis will maintain – we do not have a stream of consciousness at all, merely a sequence of isolated momentary stream-phases. This is an issue Broad does not address. He may have assumed that a sequence of specious presents which (a) belong to the same subject, and (b) form a dense continuum, cannot fail to be phenomenally unified. But this does not follow, for the familiar reason that a succession of experiences does not automatically constitute an experience of succession.
Although Husserl was certainly very much aware of the continuity issue, his account of how individual specious presents combine to form streams of consciousness is, in many respects, very similar to the pictures painted by Brentano and Broad. Husserl supplied several time-diagrams to illustrate the details of his theory, several are along the lines of Figure 18 below.[20]
Figure 18. Husserl’s time diagram.
The horizontal axis now represents a continuous flow of primal impressions, the vertical axes represent a selection of retentions (and in the case of F) protentions which accompany the primal impressions D, E and F. (A ‘selection’ because in reality, according to Husserl, a continuous stretch of consciousness consists of a dense continuum of primal impressions, each of which is accompanied by its ‘comet’s tail’ of retentions and protentions.) As can be seen, individual primal impressions are retained in later specious presents – as previously, increased ‘pastness’ is indicated by a greater number of asterisks. What goes for momentary primal impressions also goes for intervals: D-E is retained at F in the form of the retentional continuum E*-D**.
From what we have seen so far, with the exception of the protentional aspect of consciousness, there are no significant differences between this Husserlian theory and Broad’s later model. But differences there are. Unlike Broad, Husserl addresses the Strong Continuity Thesis – albeit not in so many words – and has a good deal to say about the experiential relationships between neighbouring specious, relationships which (he believes) suffice to secure the kind of continuity in consciousness which actually exists. What he has to say on this topic is difficult to interpret, and his views underwent changes, but they are by no means devoid of interest.
Broad’s specious presents are complex things, containing as they do continuum-many phases possessing distinct degrees of presentedness. In some of his writings, Husserl introduces (or recognizes) an additional level of complexity. In a manner reminiscent of Brentano’s (early) view, according to the Husserlian doctrine of the ‘double intentionality’ of retentions, it is not only past primal impressions that are retained, so too are the acts of experiencing which apprehend them. Accordingly, at each moment we have a retentional awareness not merely of past perceptual objects (e.g., tone-phases), but the experiences in which these objects are presented or apprehended. It is in virtue of this second level or aspect of retention that consciousness manages to unify itself over time, or so Husserl believed.
What does this amount to in practice? Husserl again toyed with a variety of options, and seemed to have difficulty in reaching a settled view. According to one proposal he considered, a retention such as E* in Figure 18 does not merely represent the momentary primal impression to which it is directed, it represents (or ‘intends’) an entire act-phase or streamal cross-section. In more concrete terms, the retention in question not only contains a representation of E (the original primal impression), it also contains representations of all the retentions and protentions that were experienced with E. Since each of these nested retentions and protentions themselves represent entire act-phases, and so on ad infinitum (within the limits of the specious present) we are clearly dealing here with a highly complicated experiential structure. Thanks to this structure, later stream-phases retain a rich awareness of their immediate predecessors. But in other writings, Husserl envisages the continuity of consciousness being secured by a somewhat different mechanism:
There is one, unique flow in consciousness in which both the unity of the tone in immanent time and the unity of the flow of consciousness itself become constituted at once. … The flow of the consciousness that constitutes immanent time not only exists but is so remarkably and yet intelligibly fashioned that a self-appearance of the flow necessarily appears in it, and therefore the flow itself must necessarily be apprehensible in the flowing. (1991: 84, 88)
Husserl sometimes used the terms ‘horizontal-intentionality and ‘transverse-intentionality’ and to refer, respectively, to the stream-unifying and object-constituting functions of consciousness. Figure 19 (which for good measure includes protentions too) is an attempt to express this pictorially – although only a single retention and a single protention are shown here, in reality there would be a continuum of them.
Figure 19.
Husserl refers to the upper level – the level in which consciousness unifies itself, in which consciousness is perpetually passively aware of itself as flowing – as ‘absolute’ time-consciousness. He suggests absolute consciousness (or ‘absolute subjectivity’) is best thought of as a quasi-temporal process, on the grounds that our ordinary temporal concepts properly apply only to objects we perceive in time, and not to the phenomenal processes which make such perceptions possible.
The introduction of absolute time-consciousness may solve one problem, but another quickly appears. If absolute time-consciousness is itself extended through time, and is composed of momentary phases, what is it that unifies these phases? We could posit a further and higher stratum of consciousness, but since the same issue immediately arises with respect to this new level, nothing would be gained. Husserl’s initial response was to hold that the flow of absolute consciousness is not an ordinary temporal process: it is not something which extends or flows through time, it is that within which time itself – in the form of temporal objects and processes – arises and flows. Quite how Husserl’s doctrine of absolute consciousness should be construed has been much discussed by commentators; Hoerl (2013a) proposes – intriguingly – that it is linked to a previously overlooked Extensionalist tendency in Husserl’s thought.[21]
In later writings, after his discovery of the transcendental-phenomenological ego, Husserl’s thought took another turn. Rather than holding that streams of consciousness unify themselves over (or through) time, he now claims that the unifying work is carried out by the ego:
Following later clarifications (1932), I have come to the conviction that two kinds of intentionality in the proper sense do not exist, and consequently, that a pre-temporalization in the proper sense does not exist either. The actual temporalization that is presupposed and achieved in the actual temporal givenness of the stream of experiences is the temporalization of the transcendental-phenomenologizing ego … Temporality just is an egoic performance in every mode, an original or an acquired one. (C17, Kortooms 266)
As usual, there are complications. Although in this passage Husserl rejects the horizontal and transverse modes of intentionality that he previously held to be responsible for the creation of temporal unities in experience, it is not clear that he took the ego to be responsible for all modes of temporal unity. There are occasions when he seems think the most basic forms of experience possess a passive ‘pre-temporal’ flow-structure prior to the involvement of the ego – see Kortooms (2002: chapter 6) for more on this. This complication aside, the basic picture is reasonably clear. As with absolute consciousness, since the ego is not itself a temporal object – it lies outside time, it is what creates or constitutes temporality – and so the issue of what unifies the successive phases of an ego (or an ego’s awareness) simply does not arise.
The gain is a substantial one, but is by no means cost-free: Husserl is now taking us deep into exotic metaphysical territory. And for those who are prepared to follow him there, new questions arise. What precisely is the relationship between the pre-temporal ego and the temporalized contents of ordinary consciousness? If an ego is aware of change and succession among such contents, it is natural to suppose that its awareness must also be temporally extended, phenomenally speaking. But if so, we are confronted once more with the question of what unifies the successive phases of ego’s consciousness: what prevents these phases being a mere succession of experiencings, rather than an experiencing of succession? To avoid this, we might hold that the ego’s awareness is timeless in character, in the manner of Husserl’s own ‘absolute consciousness’. The worry now is intelligibility: can we be confident that we can really make sense of this mode of consciousness?
6.4 Assessments
The Retentional approach has some distinct advantages over the alternative forms of realism. All variants of the approach have this much in common: they compress the experiencing of change into momentary (or near-momentary) phases of consciousness. In virtue of this, Retentional models are compatible with metaphysical doctrines which require precisely this feature. The most obvious candidate here is Presentism, the doctrine that what is not present is not real (see §7.2). In contrast, Extensional models require contents that are distributed through an interval of (ordinary, objective) time to be experienced together, in a single unified phenomenal state. It is not obvious that such models are compatible with the doctrine that reality itself is confined to the momentary present. Accommodating the latter doctrine poses no problems whatsoever for Retentional models.
No less important is the Retentional theorists’ solution to the problem of diachronic phenomenal unity. All forms of the Extensional approach stipulate that our immediate awareness is capable of routinely bridging a temporal interval. This could be viewed as admitting an unusual – and arguably undesirable – form of action-at-a-distance. Retentional models are free of this heavy commitment: the only mode of phenomenal unity such models require is the sort which connects contents that are both momentary and simultaneous. By virtue of their conformity with PSA, Retentional models offer an appealing reduction of diachronic unity to synchronic unity. Again, this option is not available to Extensional theorists, who are obliged to recognize two forms of phenomenal unity rather than just one. Further, as we saw in §2.5 and §5.5, there are those – e.g., Meinong – who believe that incurable problems arise if we suppose phenomenal unity can extend over time. Though we as also saw in §5.5, the Extensional theorists can, with some plausibility, argue that claims along these lines are question-begging.
Confining the experience of change to momentary episodes of experiencing may have its advantages, but it also makes for difficulties of a distinctive sort. It might be objected that it is simply impossible for the temporal properties of experiences and their contents to diverge so dramatically: how could the latter be temporally extended when the former are not? In reply, the Retentional theorist can point out that it is widely accepted that the properties of representational vehicles, and the contents carried by these vehicles, commonly diverge – although in this instance there are certain significant complications (for further discussion of this issue see §7.1). Also pertinent here is our current level of ignorance concerning the relationship between the experiential and the physical. Given that we are sure of so little in this domain, do we have any real grounds for supposing that it is impossible for momentary (or very brief) brain-states to generate experiences which possess temporal depth on the subjective or phenomenal level?
The Simultaneity Problem (in its Retentional guise) may not in principle be insuperable, but in addition to establishing the bare possibility of objectively simultaneous contents appearing successive, Retentionalists should also aim to supply an intelligible and credible account of how this appearance is created. Retentional theorists subscribe to the doctrine of PT-realism, and so believe that change, succession and persistence figure in our immediate experience. We saw in §3 that some realists also subscribe to the Immediacy Thesis, and hold that change, and other dynamic properties, feature as vividly in our experience as colour or shape. For deep-seated structural reasons, Retentional models have difficulty in accommodating the Immediacy Thesis. If retentions have the same force and vivacity as ordinary (presently occurring, first-order) experience, as they do on the Non-Modal variant, there is the risk of flooding consciousness with enormous quantities of surplus content – content which we have no reason to suppose exists, as we saw in §6.2. It is thus not surprising to find that Retentional theorists generally subscribe to the Modal form of the doctrine, and hold that retentions lack the force and vivacity of presently occurring contents. But this option also brings a danger: if retentions are too unlike ordinary experience, there is a risk they will prove incapable of doing the job they are intended to do: namely, be the purveyors of our immediate impressional experience of persistence, succession and change. To maintain that the dilemma is fatal to the prospects of the Retentional approach would be premature. But Brentano and Husserl’s shifting position on the nature of retentions – recall the appeals to unreal objects, judgements, primitive phenomenal features, additional dimensions, temporal modes of presentation and the like – is indicative of the difficulty of finding the right balance here, or so might purveyors of alternative forms of realism allege.
Continuity is also problematic from a Retentional perspective. As we have seen, the Modest Continuity Thesis is easily accommodated. All the latter requires is that there be no gaps in a typical stream of consciousness, and by stipulating that retentional specious presents form dense, gap-free successions, this requirement is easily met. Strong Continuity requires a good deal more: real experiential or phenomenal connections between neighbouring stream-phases. This is harder by far to achieve within a Retentional framework. What is needed is a credible account of how neighbouring specious presents are related to one another which permits phenomenal continuity to run without impediment between specious presents, as well as within them – or so proponents of Strong Continuity will maintain. Yet the defining characteristic of the Retentional approach is the confinement of phenomenal unity to within momentary states of consciousness, which is tantamount to the denial that phenomenal continuity can connect earlier and later stream-phases, in the manner permitted by Extensional approaches.
So far as the Strong Continuity Thesis is concerned, Broad did not address the objection that Retentional models atomize or fragment the stream of consciousness. Both he and Husserl were inclined to view individual specious presents as abstractions from full-blown streams of consciousness, and thus incapable of leading an independent existence. But if they believed taking this step suffices to secure Strong Continuity they were mistaken. Rendering individual specious presents dependent on their neighbours in the envisaged manner certainly affects their metaphysical status, but it does not, in itself, do anything to forge phenomenal connections between such states. Husserl saw there was a real problem here, and at different stages of his career he ventured different solutions. Early on he appealed to multiply-nested retentions. But arguably, these merely increase the complexity within individual momentary specious presents, without bridging the gap between specious presents. The doctrine of horizontal intentionality merely pushes the difficulty up a level: how precisely do we have an awareness at one time of earlier acts of awareness without our awareness itself extending over time? In later writings, Husserl sought to solve the problem by excluding the unifying agent – first in the form of absolute time-consciousness, later in guise of the transcendental ego – from ordinary time altogether. These manoeuvres may indeed solve the problem, but they also leave the Retentional model reliant upon exotic and heavy-duty metaphysical machinery. While Strawson (2009: Part 5) favours the Retentionalist conception of individual specious presents, he does not see the lack of direct experiential connections between successive stream-phases as in the least problematic; but since Strawson also believes that both the Modest and Strong Continuity Theses are false, this is not surprising.
Difficulties aside, the Retentional approach in general, and Husserl’s work in particular, has provoked interest among neuro- and cognitive scientists, and like-minded philosophers. See the supplementary document Husserl, the Brain and Cognitive Science for overviews and critical assessments.
For discussion of some further issues relating to the Retentional specious present see the supplementary document The Specious Present: Further Issues.
7. Metaphysics of Temporal Consciousness
7.1 Time of Consciousness vs Consciousness of Time
The word ‘red’ can represent the colour red without itself being red. If the message ‘bring the red flag’ is successfully transmitted by Morse code, red is signified by a temporal pattern rather than a spatial pattern. To accommodate this sort of divergence the distinction is commonly drawn between the content and the vehicle of a representation: the former is that which is being represented, the latter is the entity which carries or bears the representation. It is by no means impossible for a representational vehicle to possess one or more of the properties that are represented by the content it carries, e.g. bold and black, but this is not always or necessarily the case, as just seen. Experiences can represent temporal features – a glance at a clock will reveal the time – but they also themselves possess temporal features (e.g., different experiences have different durations). How are the temporal characteristics that are represented in or by experiences related to the temporal characteristics of the experiences themselves? In the rather special case of conscious thoughts, there need be no close correspondence between content- and vehicle-properties: the thought ‘I’ve been thinking about this for many years’ need only occupy a moment or two. But what of the more basic forms of consciousness, forms of the sort we have been concerned with – patterns in sensation, sequences of perceptual experiences, and the like? As we shall see, the content-vehicle distinction impacts upon or intersects the issues we have been concerned with thus far in a number of interrelated ways.
Systematic divergences between content- and vehicle-properties lie at the heart of the debate between the Extensional and Retentional approaches. Retentional theorists are committed to the claim that experiences which present us with succession or persistence are able to disguise (or conceal) their true temporal properties. Why? Because the contents of individual specious presents appear to be temporally extended even though the episodes of experiencing that possess these same contents are themselves momentary or minimally brief (as measured by clock time). This amounts to a clear-cut divergence between the temporal properties of the contents carried by specious presents, and the specious presents themselves.
The Extensional approach carries no such implications. For on this view, a typical specious present is itself temporally extended, and its parts succeed one another in time in just the way they seem to. Here vehicle and content share their temporal properties. Or as Foster puts it, ‘we have to take each experience to extend over a period of real time in a way which exactly matches the phenomenal period it presents.’ (1991: 249) However, while this precise matching may well be the norm, Extensional theorists will want to find room to allow the apparent (or subjective) duration of an objective interval to vary: a few seconds spent waiting at traffic lights can seem like far longer. This sort of discrepancy amount to another respect in which it is possible for content- and vehicle-properties to differ. (For further discussion see Section 1 of the supplementary document The Specious Present: Further Issues.)
The viability of the Retentional approach by no means entirely depends on the content/vehicle distinction, but Retentionalists can and do appeal to it when trying to overcome resistance to the very idea that change and succession can reside in momentary episodes of experiencing. It is worth noting that in this instance there is an unusually close correspondence between the relevant content- and vehicle-properties. In the case of a Retentional specious present, the relevant contents represent succession, but they do so by appearing as a succession (rather than by carrying an inscription ‘this is a succession’). Does this mean the vehicle must itself be temporally extended, so as to be able to include the apprehended succession? Not necessarily, for Retentional theorists can insist that we need to distinguish between succession as a purely phenomenal feature – i.e., a property of conscious mental states or representations – and succession as a property of physical events in the wider world. This move made, Retentional theorists can go on to argue that there is no reason to think that phenomenal successions (and similarly for other temporal properties) cannot reside within episodes of experiencing that are themselves momentary. While this may well be true, it now looks very much as though it is the phenomenal/physical distinction that is doing the real work, rather than the content/vehicle distinction.
The latter distinction has entered recent debates by another route. The school of contemporary ‘representationalists’ – e.g., Dretske, Harman and Tye – hold that otherwise intractable-seeming problems can be sidestepped by drawing on the distinction between vehicles and contents. From the fact that the content of our experience is ‘red object over there’ or somesuch, we should not conclude that the vehicle of this content is itself red. In a more general vein, experiences of colour are not themselves coloured, experiences of sound are not themselves sonic. In this manner, the problematic phenomenal properties – or sense-data, or qualia-instantiations – retreat from the scene. They are pushed still further away by the second main plank of the representationalist’s approach: an insistence on the ‘transparency’ of experience. By this they mean that in ordinary perceptual experience, we have no awareness whatsoever of our experiences themselves, we are simply aware of the (worldly) objects and properties that are presented in or by our experiences. If our experiences are invisible, there is no need to introduce properties of experience – phenomenal properties, qualia, sense-data and such – in order to explain the content and character of our ordinary perceptual consciousness. Extending this general approach to the particular case of temporal consciousness, Tye argues as follows. First of all, if we assume the transparency thesis is true, the traditional assumption that it is experiences that are related by succession or simultaneity is misguided:
The basic intuition with respect to unity through time is surely that things and qualities we experience at successive times are experienced as continuing on or as succeeding one another. Consider again the case in which I have an experience of a red flash followed by a green flash. Here I experience two colored flashes as occurring one after the other. I do not experience my experience of a red flash as succeeding my experience of a green one any more than I experience my experience of a red flash as red. (203: 96)
Accordingly, Tye holds that anyone seeking to account for our ability to directly apprehend change by appealing to a unifying relationship between experiences is also misguided: there simply aren’t the token experiences there to be unified; a given period or stretch of consciousness is not composed of successive perceptions or experiences (203: 102). By way of an alternative he offers a one experience view of streams of consciousness: ‘The simplest hypothesis compatible with what is revealed by introspection is that, for each period of consciousness, there is only a single experience – an experience that represents everything experienced within the period of consciousness as a whole.’ (2003: 97) As for the manner in which succession itself is represented in the vehicles of phenomenal content, since introspection provides us with no access to these vehicles, Tye leaves the issue entirely open.
Whether or not experiences can be eliminated in this manner is controversial, but in any event the direct awareness of change and persistence is alive and well in Tye’s scheme, it has simply been re-located and re-described. Tye himself sees the need to distinguish between direct and indirect phenomenal unity. Direct unity obtains when the qualities represented in one specious present are experienced as succeeding on from qualities in the immediately preceding specious present; indirect unity is the ancestral of direct unity, and obtains when qualities experienced in non-adjacent specious presents are connected by chains of direct phenomenal unity (2003: 100). This general picture is close to the orthodox one, at least to the extent that some experienced qualities in a stream of consciousness are experienced as successive, while others – farther apart in time – are not. Of course, those who adhere to the orthodox representational theory, according to which the immediate objects and properties of experience are phenomenal – and Russell, Broad and Foster all fall into this category – will see no need to adopt Tye’s way of re-conceiving diachronic phenomenal unity.[22]
Returning to the main theme, it is by no means necessary to be a sense-datum theorist in order to believe that there are systematic correlations between the temporal properties of experiences and their contents. If my clock goes TICK-TICK-TICK I will hear TICK-TICK-TICK, with the order and temporal separation of the outer events being mirrored – in a generally faithful manner – by the order and temporal separation of my experiences (or the contents they are carrying). Or so it seems plausible to suppose: as external events occur they are detected (after some delay) by our sensory organs, and when the resulting signals reach the brain they trigger experiences, with the order of the experiences (or their contents) reflecting the order of the relevant events.
This mirroring of basic temporal features has given rise to the idea that, in a manner of speaking, time represents itself. Mellor starts from the premise that seeing e precede e* requires one to have a memory-trace of seeing e while actually perceiving e*. Since memory is a causal process, and causes precede their effects, it is only possible to perceive that e precedes e* if one’s perception of e occurs before one’s perception of e*. Hence Mellor’s conclusion:
Perceptions do not usually share the features they are perceptions of … There need be nothing thermal about feeling heat, nothing coloured in colour vision, and nothing (relevantly) spatial about perceiving spatial relations … But perceiving temporal order does demand a corresponding temporal ordering of perceptions. (1985: 144)
The general point is not new, and it applies to directly experienced successions, as well as the memory-based ‘seeing’ of successions that Mellor describes. James quotes Helmholtz, who maintained that the only case in which
our perceptions can truly correspond with outer reality, is that of the time-succession of phenomena. Simultaneity, succession … can obtain as well in sensations as in outer events. Events, like our perceptions of them, take place in time, so that the time-relations of the latter can furnish a true copy of those of the former. The sensation of the thunder follows the sensation of the lightning just as the sonorous convulsing of the air by the electric discharge reaches the observers place later than that of the luminiferous ether. (James 1890: 629)
The picture painted by Helmholz is plausible and appealing. If the pianist plays the note D followed by F followed by G, the pianist’s audience will have a succession of specious presents in which D is experienced as giving way to F, which in turn gives way to G. Needless to say, the details of the process differ depending on the particular form of realism: the tales told by Cinematic and Extensional theorists is relatively straightforward, while matters are rather more convoluted in the case of Retentional models.
There are, inevitably, complications. In the broad run of cases the temporal relationships between and within our perceptual experiences may accurately reflect the temporal relationships between the events we perceive, but this is by no means always or necessarily the case. If I were to see a star explode whilst hearing a clap of thunder (a remote coincidence, admittedly, but by no means an impossible one), I would be mistaken to conclude that these two events were in fact simultaneous. Since the light from the star has taken years to reach me, whereas the sound from the thunder has been delayed by only a few seconds, my experience is presenting as simultaneous events that are non-simultaneous. There are further complications on the micro-temporal scale. It is possible for quite striking ordering discrepancies to arise on shorter time-scales – i.e., of few tenths of a second, with stimuli measured in a few tens of milliseconds. In the case of the ‘flash-lag illusion’, for example, stimuli which are in fact simultaneous appear as successive (for more on this see Section 3 of the supplementary documents Husserl, the Brain and Cognitive Science and the supplementary document Interpreting Temporal Illusions).
Dennett makes much of these phenomena, arguing that on the micro-temporal scale there need be no correspondence between the order in which we represent events as occurring and the order in which these events impinge on our perceptual systems: ‘what matters is that the brain can proceed to control events “under the assumption that A happened before B” whether or not the information that A has happened enters the relevant system of the brain and gets recognized as such before or after the information that B has happened.’ (1991: 149)[23] Also, over short intervals it is possible for the brain’s interpretation of what happens at a given time to be revised or ‘re-written’ in the light of subsequent information. Dennett goes on to argue that there is often no fact of the matter concerning the precise time at which informational vehicles become conscious – hence his preference for talking in terms of ‘informational vehicles’ as opposed to ‘experiences’. There is also no fact of the matter as to which information vehicles are conscious independently of which ‘probes’ or queries are carried out. For Dennett, the assumption that anything akin to the Jamesian stream of consciousness exists is mistaken. These doctrines are important parts of his ‘multiple-drafts’ theory of consciousness, which we will be looking at in more detail in §7.3.
In arguing for these striking conclusions Dennett relies only in part on a variety of puzzling phenomena (‘temporal illusions’) discovered by psychologists investigating our perceptual abilities over short time scales. He also places considerable weight on the general distinction between content-properties and vehicle-properties, insisting frequently on the dangers of confusing them, or supposing that representations need share the properties represented in their contents. Phillips forcefully takes Dennett to task for failing to recognize that the temporal case is different and distinctive in this regard:
Experiences which represent green trees do not themselves have to be green. Nor of course is Emily Dickenson’s reference to Spring – ‘This whole experiment of green’ – itself green! Yet it is hard to see how this bears on the case in point. Time is uniquely common to experience and its objects. Consequently, there is no clear analogy at all between the representation of green in experience (or poetry) and the representation of simultaneity or duration in experience. Experiences do not have colour properties; they do have temporal properties. (2009: 34–5)
Returning to Helmholtz’s claim, when in the Principles James remarked of it ‘This philosophy is unfortunately too crude’ (1890: 628) he was not concerned with the sort of counterexamples we have just been considering. James was making a far more general point:
Even though we were to conceive the outer successions as forces stamping their image on the brain, and the brain’s successions as forces stamping their image on the mind, still, between the mind’s own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world. A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. … what is past, to be known as past, must be known with what is present, and during the ‘present’ spot of time. (1890: 628–9)
James here berates Helmholtz for failing to recognize that a mere succession of experiences does not add up to an experience of succession, and then goes on to endorse a Retentional account of where the difference between the two lies: the earlier and later parts of a succession must be experienced together and simultaneously in order to be experienced as a succession. And for the reasons already outlined, this means James himself was committed – to the extent he was a Retentionalist – to a quite systematic divergence between the temporal properties of experiential contents and the temporal properties of experiences. For more on James’ views on the specious present, see Section 3 of the supplementary document The Specious Present: Further Issues.
7.2 Temporal Consciousness and the Metaphysics of Time
Just as there are different conceptions of the nature of temporal awareness, there are very different conceptions of the nature and large-scale structure and composition of time itself (i.e., the time of the universe as a whole). Can we hope to learn anything about the nature of our experience of time from theories about time per se? This is a complex issue, and this is not the place for a thorough investigation of it. Nonetheless, even a cursory look at the lay of the land reveals a few points that are worth noting.
Most of the connections between the metaphysics and the phenomenology of time involve, in one way or another, temporal passage. The latter can be characterized in a number of ways, but at the very least passage is associated with the steady advance of the present, an advance which entails that future times will become present, that present times and events will become past, and that past times become every more past with every passing moment. But while few deny that time seems to pass – and indeed, that this passage is (along with dimensionality) the most obvious difference between time and space – there are many who have denied that time really does pass. Of these a few share McTaggart’s view that time cannot pass because time does not exist. A more popular view, these days at least, is the view that while time certainly exists, it is more akin to space than it superficially seems. Proponents of the four-dimensional ‘Block’ universe – also known as eternalism – hold that there is no ontological distinction between past, present and future, and that all times are equally real. They further hold that there is no unique privileged present time, and a fortiori that there is no such thing as a moving present.[24] Block theorists face a significant challenge: Why does time seem to pass if it doesn’t? Part of the explanation lies in the way our memories accumulate. Another part of the explanation lies in the character of our experience. Time per se may not pass or flow, but there is undeniably something akin to passage and flow in our immediate experience, and this phenomenal passage does not require physical passage, it can exist a four-dimensional Block universe. Or so proponents of the latter maintain.
The Block conception of time has its advantages. It has an appealing simplicity, and accords well with Einstein’s relativity theories, to mention but two. But the rejection of objective temporal passage is not to everyone’s taste, and other conceptions of time also have their advocates. The main contenders are depicted in Figure 20 below.
Figure 20. Four conceptions of the large-scale composition of the universe.
At the opposite extreme to the 4-D Block view is Presentism, the doctrine that concrete reality is confined to the momentary present. Presentists deny any reality to the past or future. Coming in between these extremes is the Growing Block model. According to the latter, the past is real but the future is not, and the sum total of reality is gradually increasing, by a process of moment-by-moment ‘absolute becoming’. On this view the present is merely the most recent addition to reality; it is also the interface between being and non-being. The Moving Spotlight model is in one respect akin to the standard Block model: it accords reality to all times and events, including those yet to occur. It differs from the latter by virtue of the fact that it incorporates objective passage into the universe, in the shape of a privileged (and constantly advancing) present – indicated by the blue line in Figure 20. Moving Spotlight theorists agree with Block theorists that both the future and the past exist, but they tend to hold that present events are (in some manner) distinctive.[25]
How do these different conceptions of time accord with our competing realist accounts of temporal consciousness? One point is more obvious that most. If reality is confined to a momentary present in the way Presentists maintain, then it is difficult to see how any form of the Extensional approach can be true. Our immediate experience cannot extend through time if time itself has no extension; if earlier and later stream-phases are experienced together, in the way Extensional models require, then it seems very plausible to suppose that these phases must both exist. (Or to put it another way: an experience which no longer figures in the sum total of reality is not in a position to be part of the same unified state of consciousness as an experience which does so figure, any more than a non-existent brick can help hold up a wall.) By contrast, since Retentional theorists hold that our experience of time takes no time – objectively speaking – their position looks to be entirely compatible with Presentism, and similarly for the Cinematic models (realist and non-realist). [26]
Is that the end of the story? Not necessarily, for the Extensional approach is perfectly compatible with version of Presentism which grant to the present a brief duration. It is only Presentism of the strictest form which is irreconcilable with the Extensional approach – for further discussion of this issue see Dainton (2001: ch.6 and §7.8, also forthcoming) and McKinnon (2003: §10). The same manoeuvre will be necessary to secure the compatibility of Extensional models with the Moving Spotlight conception of passage. The latter is most plausible when the existence of consciousness is confined to the present, so a strictly momentary Spotlight is problematic for the Extensional approach. It is otherwise for a Spotlight which possesses some brief duration.
As for the 4-D Block conception, it looks equally compatible with both views of phenomenal temporality. The Retentional theorists’ momentary specious presents can exist in universes of this sort, as can those of Cinematic theorists, but so too can the non-momentary specious presents to be found in Extensional models.
But perhaps the situation is not quite so straightforward. Someone might object: ‘There cannot be an experience of succession without genuine succession, and the latter consists of the coming into being of successive phases of a stream of consciousness.’ If this view could be shown to be correct, the Growing Block theorist would have the upper hand. For if reality as a whole comes into being, drop by drop (or slice by slice), then so too does experience, and the experience of succession would thereby be possible. Of course, the viability of this line of argument depends on the initial premise: does the experience of succession require absolute becoming? Retentionalists will reject this entirely, holding as they do that experienced succession occurs within momentary slices of consciousness. Extensionalists can also question the premise. If the Extensional conception of Jamesian ‘duration-blocks’ expounded earlier were along the right lines, then experienced succession would be an intrinsic phenomenal feature of temporally extended experiences, and as such would not require the successive coming-into-being of experiential phases. Also, the earlier and later phases of a duration-block are experienced together (they are diachronically co-conscious), and it is by no means obvious that this relationship requires absolute becoming; indeed, it is more naturally construed as a connection between experiential phases which exist at neighbouring times.[27]
There is obviously more work to be done here, and for further discussion see Baron (forthcoming), Callender (2008), Deng (2013a, 2013b), Dainton (2011, 2016), Frischut (2015), Ismael (2015), Paul (2014), Power (2015) and Prosser (2016). But it doesn’t look as though there are many straightforward or simple answers to the question: ‘What do the differing conceptions of the nature of time imply about the nature of temporal awareness?’
7.3 Memory, Experience and Determinacy
PT-realists hold that Reid drew the line between sense and memory in the wrong place: our immediate experience is not confined to an instantaneous present, it extends a short way through time, with Cinematic theorists, Retentionalists and Extensionalists offering very different accounts of how this is possible. For Dennett, the debate has been conducted on false premises, for in some cases at least, there is no sharp dividing line between memory and experience, and the project of trying to ascertain the temporal microstructure of consciousness is misconceived. In support of this claim Dennett deploys a range of intriguing examples – including the cutaneous rabbit and the colour phi phenomenon (see Section 3 of the supplementary documents Husserl, the Brain and Cognitive Science and supplementary document Interpreting Temporal Illusions) – but the main line of argument can be brought out with one of his simplest. (For the full case see Dennett (1991: chapters 5–6, and also Dennett and Kinsbourne 1992).
In cases of so-called ‘backward masking’, if two stimuli are presented in rapid succession, most subjects will be able to identify the second (and later) stimulus far more reliably than the first. In the particular experiment Dennett describes, the target stimulus is a solid disk, shown for 30 msec, and the mask – shown immediately afterwards – is a larger surrounding circle. Although subjects are shown both images, when queried they report that they saw just one: the circle. The standard interpretation of this sort of experiment, according to Dennett, is that in such cases the subject do not experience the target stimulus: they have no visual experience of the disk, the occurrence of the masking stimulus somehow interferes with the normal perceptual process. However, as he also notes, there is a second possible interpretation of the subject’s responses. Perhaps the subjects do experience the disk, but something interferes with their memory of this experience, and so when subsequently queried they deny having seen it. Dennett labels the first mechanism Stalinesque: since the experiences our perceptual systems produce do not accurately reflect the stimuli, there is a sense in which they are putting on a false and misleading display, in a manner (somewhat) reminiscent of Stalin’s show-trials. He calls the second mechanism Orwellian: a false and misleading version of recent events is being created by the subjects’ memories, and so history is being rewritten, in a manner (somewhat) reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984.
Dennett is right that the evidence thus far presented can be interpreted in each of these ways, but what should we make of this? The natural response would be to hold that in the absence of any further plausible interpretations of the evidence, then either the Stalinesque or the Orwellian version of events must be true: if the latter, then the subjects do experience the disk, if the former they don’t. Dennett maintains that this line of thinking is mistaken. In the case described, and others like it, neither interpretation is correct, there is simply no fact of the matter as to whether or not the subject’s experience the disk or not: ‘the distinction between perceptual revisions and memory revisions that works so crisply at other scales is not guaranteed application … The boundary between perception and memory, like most boundaries, is not perfectly sharp’ (Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992: §2.2). The assumption that there must be a determinate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to the question of whether or not the subject saw the disk is grounded, he argues, in an appealing but mistaken neo-Cartesian conception of experience. According to this conception, for any given subject during their waking hours the question ‘What is currently appearing on the stage of your consciousness?’ always has a fully precise answer, an answer determined by the experiential contents present in the relevant subject’s consciousness. In place of this conception he offers his ‘Multiple Drafts’ model. The latter is not easily summarized, but it replaces the familiar Jamesian stream of consciousness with a multiplicity of ‘informational vehicles’, and tightly connects the correct ascription of experiences to subjects to what they say and do, and hence what they remember: ‘We might classify the Multiple Drafts model then as first-person operationalism, for it brusquely denies the possibility in principle of consciousness of a stimulus in the absence of that subject’s belief in that consciousness’ (1991: 132).
Dennett’s position is open to criticism on two main fronts. He asserts that there is no possibility that future research will uncover evidence that will allow us to distinguish between Orwellian and Stalinesque interpretations. How can he be so confident about what the future will bring? Second-guessing scientific progress is a dangerous game. His argument also has a verificationist slant, relying as it does on the principle that if there is no possible evidence that P obtains, there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not P obtains. When applied to ordinary material objects this principle has counterintuitive consequences. Suppose there is a box that cannot be opened, or probed by X-rays, ultrasound or any similar method. Does the fact that we will never be in a position to discover what is inside the box mean there is no fact of the matter about its contents, about whether it contains something or nothing at all? Dennett himself agrees that verificationism is objectionable in this sort of case, but insists that it is legitimate when it comes to questions concerning the existence (or non-existence) of experiences. Those who are inclined to a robust realism about the phenomenal realm will certainly find this downgrading of the ontological credentials of conscious experiences objectionable. For this reason they are likely to find Dennett’s attempt to further downgrade these credentials by appealing to features of short-term experience guilty of begging the question.[28]
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