4.3 An Account of Unity through Time

19. The problem, posed in this way, is no more real than the problem of the unity of experiences at a time; for there is no relation of unity between token experiences that is given to us in introspection. When we introspect, we are not aware of our experiences at all. As explained in chapters 1 and 2, we are aware of things outside, of changes in our bodies or our­selves, and of various qualities these items are experienced as having. Thereby we are aware that we are having such and such experiences. But we are not aware of the token experiences themselves. So, we are not aware of our experi­ences as unified or as continuing through time or as suc­ceeding one another. And if this is the case, why suppose that that unity through time is a relation between token experiences at different times?

20. 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. Moreover, if I introspect my experience of a red flash followed by a green flash, I do not discover an experience of a red flash and then after it an experience of a green one. Via introspection, I am not aware of any inner particulars at all. I am aware that I am having an experience of a red flash followed by a green one, but I am not aware of two different particular experiences, one of a red flash and one of a green one. Of course, I am aware of the qualities, red and green. But I am aware of these as qualities of flashes, not as qualities of my experiences.

21. What is true here for the experiences of red and green flashes is true for other experiences. If I experience a loud, high-pitched sound, it is the auditory qualities of the sound that are experienced as continuing from moment to moment; if I feel a pain in a thumb, it is the changing qualities of the disturbance I experience in my thumb that are experienced by me, as the pain starts to throb and intensify. Continuity, change, and succession are experi­enced as features of items experienced, not as features of experiences.

22. In the earlier example of hearing the musical scale, do-re-mi, there is an experience of all three notes, with each note being experienced as flowing into and being succeeded by the next. As the scale ends, it is succeeded by something else—something accessible either by hearing or by another sense—provided that consciousness continues. With each experienced change in things and qualities, there is an expe­rience of the change. But this does not necessitate that there be a new experience. 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 (the period, that is, between one state of unconsciousness and the next).

23. Admittedly, this hypothesis may seem to be at odds with such everyday statements as "I had many strange experiences today." But in reality there is no conflict. Talk of my undergoing many strange experiences no more requires for its truth that there exist multiple strange experiences than does talk of my having a drowning feeling require that there be a feeling that drowns. Just as in the latter case it suf­fices that I undergo an experience that represents that I am drowning so too in the former it suffices that my experience today represented many strange things.

(25) The one experience hypothesis finds further support in the general difficulty we face in individuating experiences though time. Consider an ordinary visual experience and suppose that it is exclusively visual. When did it begin? When will it end? As I write now, I am sitting in a library. Looking ahead, and holding my line of sight fixed, I can see many books, tables, people in the distance walking across the room, a woman nearby opening some bags as she sits down. Is this a single temporally extended visual experi­ence? If not, why not?

It may be tempting to say that this is a single token expe­rience on the grounds that the same visual scene is before my eyes. The visual scene changes somewhat through time, as people move around, but that doesn't make it a different scene, any more than the changes through time in my car make it another car.

But what if I am hallucinating the scene and there is really nothing before my eyes? What if the people and things in the scene are replaced by replicas and that this is done by God without there being any noticeable change, as far as I am concerned? In the latter case, there is another scene, a duplicate of the original but a different scene nonetheless. Do I continue to undergo the same token experience?

These cases perhaps suggest that as long as apparently the same visual scene is present, the same token visual experi­ence is present. But what if I fall asleep and reopen my eyes later, with the scene apparently unchanged? Same token visual experience then? Intuitively not (if I am the subject of multiple visual experiences at all). Likewise, if I see a flash of lightning in the sky one night and the next night I see another flash that looks indistinguishable from the first.

So, neither real sameness of visual scene before the eyes nor apparent sameness in visual scene suffices to individuate purely visual experiences; and with multimodal experiences the situation is still more murky. These difficulties of individ- uation arise once it is assumed that the stream of conscious­ness divides into different token experiences, usually longer than the specious present, that come and go. The difficulties disappear if it is held instead that each stream of conscious­ness is itself just one temporally extended experience.

26. As noted in chapter 1, experiences, on my view, are maxi­mal PANIC states. For each such state, there is a momentary phenomenal character (what it is like to undergo the experi­ence at a particular moment) and an overall phenomenal char­acter (what it is like to undergo the experience from beginning to end). The phenomenal character of an experience at any given moment is its PANIC at that moment. The overall phe­nomenal character of an experience is its overall PANIC. It seems to me natural to suppose that experiences have stages; and it also seems plausible to hold that these stages have phe­nomenal character. But experience stages are not experiences, any more than undetached cloud parts are clouds.

27. Here is a parallel. Consider a movie depicting a com­plex series of events taking place during an extended period of time. The movie has a very rich representational content overall. It is a movie about war; it is a movie about peace. It is a movie about the fall of the Russian aristocracy. The movie can be boring at some times and exciting at others; for what it depicts at different times varies. Even so, there is just one movie, not many movies unified together into one encompassing movie. So too, I claim, with experience.

28. In taking this view, I am not denying that, in the exam­ple of my hearing the musical scale, do-re-mi, there is an experience of do-re in the first specious present and an experience of re-mi in the second. My point is that these are not different experiences: there is only one experience—an experience of do-re-mi—that has been described in differ­ent (partial) ways, an experience with different stages to it.

29. What, then, is phenomenal unity through time? Let us distinguish between direct and indirect unity. Direct phe­nomenal unity through time is a relation between experien- tially represented qualities. It obtains if and only if the qualities experienced in one specious present are experi­enced as succeeding or continuing on from the qualities experienced in the immediately prior specious present. Indirect phenomenal unity through time is also a relation that obtains between experientially represented qualities. It obtains if and only if the qualities experienced in nonadja- cent specious presents are linked by chains of direct phe­nomenal unity. Indirect unity is thus the ancestral of direct unity. Chains of experienced succession and flow from one specious present to the next bind together qualities experi­enced as instantiated in nonadjacent specious presents into a shared phenomenal content (where, as before, the phe­nomenal content of an experience is the part of its overall content that endows it with its phenomenal character). With a break in the chain, there is an end to the period of con­sciousness and an end to the continuing experience whose phenomenal content encompasses that period.

30. In the case that consciousness is unified through time, the claims

    1. Person P has an experience of an F and

    2. Person P has an experience of a G 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.