Temporal Experiences without the Specious Present

Abstract

Most philosophers believe that we have experiences as of temporally extended phenomena like change, motion, and succession. Almost all theories of time consciousness explain these temporal experiences by subscribing to the doctrine of the specious present, the idea that the contents of our experiences embrace temporally extended intervals of time and are presented as temporally structured. Against these theories, I argue that the doctrine is false and present a theory that does not require the notion of a specious present. Furthermore, I argue that the different aspects of temporal experiences arise from different mechanisms operating separately. If the theory is true, then temporal experiences do not tell us anything special about the nature of consciousness and its temporal properties per se.

Keywords:

• specious present
• temporal consciousness
• phenomenology

Notes

¹ Husserl [1991: 346] regarded these as ‘perhaps the most important [matters] in the whole phenomenology’. Several other noteworthy philosophers have written about the topic, too, including, for example, Barry Dainton, Bertrand Russell, C.D. Broad, Dan Zahavi, Franz Brentano, John McTaggart, John Foster, Shaun Gallagher, Thomas Reid, and William James.

² I use ‘content’ to refer to the sensory occurrences that a subject has. During one experience, whether it is a snapshot or a specious present, one is usually conscious of several phenomenal contents (i.e. colour, shape, location of objects).

³ The idea that the contents of consciousness are not confined to (near-)momentary contents was brought into the spotlight by James [1890: 631], who argued that there is a ‘short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’. Since the doctrine concerns the temporal structure of contents as they are presented in experience, not the physical duration or temporal structure of experiences themselves, and what we experience as present extends over time, this present is specious, not present in a mathematical sense.

⁴ Philosophers who implement the doctrine of the specious present in the extensionalist framework include, for instance, Dainton, Foster, and possibly James. Philosophers who implement the doctrine in the retentionalist framework include Gallagher, Husserl, and Zahavi.

⁵ James [1890: 628–9] expresses this as follows:

A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of their own succession is added, that must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special elucidation.

⁶ Both Reid and Le Poidevin claim that, in the case of succession, our current experience is supplemented with the memory of the prior experience. However, whereas Reid argues that this brings about an inference that succession took place, Le Poidevin argues that this brings about an experience of pure succession. Prosser [2016] has recently put forward a theory of temporal experiences that is very similar to Le Poidevin's theory, including the emphasis on short-term memory.

⁷ Hearing a melody is a possible exception since accounting for it may require working memory. However, in this case the memory must extend much further into the past than, according to current theories subscribing to the specious present, the specious present extends.

⁸ The described experiment is from Di Lollo [1980: experiment 1]. The experiments reported in two papers varied in (i) the nature of stimuli (dots or flashes), (ii) how the stimuli were shown (in groups of six, twelve, or sequentially one by one), (iii) the duration of the leading display, and (iv) the temporal gap between the leading and trailing displays. The results of these experiments support the results of the discussed experiment and Di Lollo's interpretation of the results, by ruling out many alternative interpretations (e.g. the suggestion that the results are only due to inverse persistence).

⁹ Di Lollo emphasizes that his explanation concurs with Robert Efron's [1970] results that the minimum duration of visual experience is 120–240 milliseconds. Efron's results do not show that our phenomenal contents are temporally extended, however, because such a period does not need to be experienced as a whole.

¹⁰ The doctrine of the specious present is thought to explain our experiences of duration, melody, and persistence (e.g. Dainton [2008] and Hoerl [2015]). This requires that both onset and offset of things are tracked—otherwise we could not separate, say, short and long notes on a melody—and hence both onset and offset matter for those subscribing to the doctrine of the specious present.

¹¹ See Dainton [2008] for further arguments against the Modal conception, and Arstila [2016] for problems concerning the notion of the temporal modes of presentation.

¹² Ball and Busch argue that such comparison takes place in early vision before different features of the stimulus are integrated.

¹³ For other objections and responses to them, especially related to postdiction effects such as apparent motion and the flash-lag effect, see Arstila [2015, 2016].

¹⁴ I am greatly indebted to Christoph Hoerl, Julian Kiverstein, and Dan Lloyd, as well as the anonymous referees for their detailed and thoughtful comments and suggestions on a prior version of this paper. I am also grateful for discussion from audience members at Vitforum, Trondheim (2013), at the research seminar in the department of philosophy, University of Helsinki (2014), and at NorMind meeting (Oslo 2015).