Consciousness and Persons by Michael Tye

Author:Michael Tye [Tye, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

The Unity of Experience through time

101

jointly entail

(3) Person P has an experience of an F and a G, just as they do in the case of unity at a time. The difference is merely that, with unity through time, the relevant experienced times for (1) and (2) are not the same (and (3), of course, is not to be read as saying that P has an experience of F and G at the same time). Unity through time, both direct and indirect, comes with the closure of experience under conjunction just as unity at a time does.

(31) The proposal I am making leaves open how succession itself is represented in the vehicles of phenomenal content.

Take, for example, the case of my experiencing a bright flash now, followed by a loud noise now, where one now immediately follows the other. The brightness of the flash in my experience is succeeded phenomenally by the loudness of the noise. Since introspection gives me no access to the vehicle of representation, it does not reveal to me the means by which succession is represented. Perhaps the relation of succession is represented by a part of the experience just as the relation of loving is represented by a part of the sentence

“Tom loves Mary.” Perhaps succession is represented by a relation between parts of the experience. That, I maintain, is an empirical matter on which the present proposal is silent.

In taking no stand on this issue, I want to emphasize that I am not leaving open the nature of phenomenal succession.

My claim is that phenomenal succession is a relation between qualities that enter into the phenomenal content of the single experience of the subject for the given period of consciousness—a relation that connects qualities instantiated in adjacent specious presents, if the experience is veridical.

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