Ch. 7 of Dainton’s Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience, “The overlap model”, summary

by Corry Shores
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[Central Entry Directory]

[The Dainton – Gallagher Phenomenal Time Debate, entry directory]

[Dainton’s Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience, entry directory]

[All boldface, underlining, and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is forthcoming; currently there are mistakes.]

Summary of

Barry Dainton

Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience

Chapter 7: 
The Overlap Model

 

Brief Summary: In the overlap model, the present moment of consciousness overlaps with its neighbors as do the contents of consciousness. These flows move together which calls into question their distinction. There is really just one flow and the act-content distinction in this model is not important. The model explains the immediate perception of change, because we are consciousness not of a present durationless moment but rather a small extent, including present moment and its neighbors. We are conscious of these past and future moments on account of co-consciousness. Our minds are not necessarily existing in the past and future but rather we are presently aware of the relation between the immediate past and future with the immediate present of our consciousness. This is diachronic co-consciousness, which is limited to only one step away from the present and is thus not ‘transitive.’ [Moment A is co-conscious with successor B, which is co-conscious with its successor C, but A is not co-conscious with C.]

 

Summary

7.1 Foster on the time within experience

The lesson Dainton obtains from his prior treatments of Husserl’s and Broad’s models of time consciousness is that anti-realist accounts face severe problems that they were unable to satisfactorily solve.

Recall the Principle of Simultaneous Awareness (PSA). We experience a past event not as being simultaneous with the present but rather we simultaneously are aware both of the present moment and the past ones as past moments no longer active in the present. Broad’s early model was realist, and it tried to be compatible with PSA. PSA seems to demand an act-object model, [because it supposes that contents can both be represented to a new act of consciousness without themselves being actually present to our awareness.] One  problem with this is that the same content will be experienced many times instead of once as our experiences suggest. Broad tries to solve it with his later model which is representationalist. It is not the same content but rather representations of its appearing in the past. This had the problem of lingering contents [Broad’s and also Husserl’s models suggest that phenomena should linger in our immediate awareness when in fact they cleanly disappear, Dainton thinks.] Dainton previously previewed another solution. Each act of awareness is not numerically distinct but rather overlaps with its neighbors. Others have posited this but John Foster gives the clearest account. (162)

Foster thinks that there are temporal objects and relations in the contents of our experience [the overlapping of moments of awareness would mean that whole temporal objects could be presented, I think Dainton is saying.] Foster has two reasons for this. The first is empirical: change and duration are given immediately to our awareness, just as much as when perceiving the homogeneity and variation of color. (162) The second is conceptual: we do not perceive color in extentless dots, we see fields, and likewise for temporal objects like sounds, we sense ‘sound-filled’ periods. (163) Foster uses the act-object model and he distinguishes two sorts of temporal relations: phenomenal relations and presentational relations. (163) When a subject is momentarily aware of a phenomenal object this is a presentational act. The acts themselves occur in presentational time but the contents are found in phenomenal time. The phenomenal object is a “a universal, a pattern of phenomenal qualities that can be apprehended by different subjects at different times.” (163) A succession of three notes we hear occupy a phenomenal time field. We can then distinguish the phenomenal time of phenomenal temporal objects from the presentational time through which they became present. (164)

Consider if we hear the C major scale with no gaps between the notes. We hear the solid succession as a single auditory experience, which is not part of a larger auditory experience. But what constitutes such an experience are the patterns exhibited. [Dainton then has us it seems consider the scale as having smaller units whose pattern is three segments with either silence or sound in each segment.’] Experience E1 has phenomenal content P1 and so on. For the scale, P1 is “2 units of silence before 1 unit of C”, P2 is “1 unit of silence before 1 unit of C before 1 unit of D” and so on. (163) As you can see, the progression of consciousness advances one step at a time with an umbrella three parts wide, making each step overlap with the neighbors. But this is strange because it means that each content is heard three times [if the progression continues, one at the end of an act, again in the middle of the next act, and again at the beginning of the third act]. So this model leads to the problem of repeated contents. However Foster offers a solution. [At first the explanation seems to be saying that because for example C is qualitatively the same in each of the three acts it appears in, they are not discerned as being different but rather as one sound happening through the passage of time.] The solution is a double overlap, the overlap of both the acts and the contents. The contents overlap because 2 thirds is always the same between any two successive acts. [The experiences have an umbrella, and the moments themselves overlap. That means it seems that when experience E2 happens, it in fact had already begun happening in the prior moment, and also in E2, experience E3 is partly beginning. So the acts overlap because every act had begun arising already in the prior act and also begun passing-away already into the act to come. Any one moment has extremities that overlap its neighbors.]

As a consequence of this double overlap, what Foster calls phenomenal and presentational time are locked together. Take E1 and E2. The contents of these experiences overlap by two thirds. So do the experiences themselves: the final two thirds of E1 are numerically identical with the first two thirds of E2. To put it another way, the act of awareness whose content is P1 and the act of awareness whose content is P2 share a common part, these acts overlap by two thirds. Similarly, since P1 and P3 are contents which overlap by one third, the awareness of P1 overlaps with the awareness of P3 by precisely one third. (164)

And “Not only do acts of awareness overlap to an extent proportional to the overlap in their contents, the temporal duration of acts is directly proportional to that of their contents.” (164)

But “Since both acts and their contents endure through time, and endure through exactly proportional periods of their respective times, what reason is there to continue talking of two distinct times here?” (165) [This would  seem to suggest the possibility that both times are moving in common time.] In fact Foster makes this claim, and also the further step of “inserting the unified mental time into ordinary objective time.” (165) Quoting Foster:

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…the sense in which E1 precedes E2, and E2 precedes E3, is not that E1, E2 and E3 occur at successive real moments, but that they occupy successive, but largely overlapping, real periods. (1991:249) (in Dainton 165)

This solution is elegant, not complex, and robustly realist.

not only do we have a direct experience of temporal relations and temporally extended phenomena, but successive phases of a stream are welded together by nothing other than direct experience. The account thus satisfies both the phenomenological constraint—we experience movement and persistence with the same immediacy as colour—and the binding principle: there is a directly experienced transition between any two adjacent phases of a stream of consciousness. (165)

It does not have the problem of Broad’s early theory where was difficulty with explaining the temporal relation between acts and contents. To explain this correspondence Husserl posited the absolute flux, but the concept was obscure. “Foster accomplishes the task in a much clearer way: successive acts of awareness overlap both in content and in substance (as he puts it), i.e. successive acts share a common part.” (165)

But there are some difficulties with Foster’s model. It seems on the one hand to have momentary acts of awareness while on the other hand every momentary act is extending into its neighbors. “But how can momentary acts overlap? A momentary act has no temporal duration, and only temporal durations (or intervals) can overlap. Two momentary acts could no more share a common part than two geometrical points.” (166) But this is not really a problem because for Foster “ awareness is not packaged into momentary acts.” (166)

To make sense of the character of our experience, we have been forced to adopt the view that acts of awareness and their contents exactly coincide in time; they run concurrently. This is the doctrine enshrined in the Principle of Presentational Concurrence, PPC. So in the course of reasoning which leads Foster to the overlap theory, he begins by (in effect) assuming PSA, and he concludes by endorsing PPC. (166)

Regarding the act-object structure Dainton argues against, he notes:

Since, according to the overlap theory, acts are themselves temporally extended and exactly coincide with their contents in temporal extent, nothing would be lost by, as it were, allowing the acts to sink into their contents, integrating awareness with content, in accord with the Simple Conception of experience. (166)

Dainton will adopt this Simple Conception and no longer distinguish acts and their contents. He will instead discuss a one-level model. (166)

Dainton then explains:

Having taken this step, it is now clear that in the context of the overlap theory, the same basic relationship of co-consciousness is responsible for the unity of consciousness both at and over time. Moreover, it is plain that although only brief and adjoining phases of a stream are co-conscious, coconsciousness is also responsible for the unity of a stream as a whole. Co-streamal experiences separated by more than the duration of the specious present are not directly co-conscious, but they are co-conscious with an | intervening succession of overlapping specious presents, which themselves are linked by co-consciousness (e.g. E1-E2-E3-E4-E5-E6). (166-167)

So co-consciousness makes neighboring moments overlap. Thus it explains the continuous overlapping of all moments. In a particular moment we are directly aware of the immediate neighboring moments. But we are indirectly aware of the ones beyond them. (167)

7.2 Innocent curiosities

But the overlap model has intriguing and perhaps problematic consequences.

One issue is that one single experience maybe be a part of a varying number of total experiences. So Dainton has us imagine that two of the three slots is occupied by one single experience of a single tone. There are two slots of Do and one of Re. But this means that there is only one total experience that takes in Do in its entirety, the first one, but the Re is taken in its entirety three times. (167)

But this is not a problem because of the overlap of the moments. Re is not experienced three times, just one time across overlapping moments. (167)

Consider transitivity. Moment one is co-conscious with 2, and 2 with three, but since 1 does not overlap with 3, the two moments are not co-conscious. “Since it is plain that experiences at one end of a long stream of consciousness are not (directly) co-conscious with those at the other, transitivity must break down somewhere along the line; introspection suggests it breaks down over relatively short periods.” (168) This might be a problem [because synchronic co-consciousness must be transitive, so if co-consciousness links time moments, why is it not transitive too?]

If Do-Re and Re-Mi are co-conscious, why would Do Mi not be co-conscious [what determines where the boundary of bleeding begins and ends, especially when in synchronic co-consciousness there is no boundary?]

the principle that any two maximally connected phenomenal wholes that are co-conscious at all are fully co-conscious is not universally valid; at best it applies only to the synchronic case, where the relevant wholes are simultaneous. That co-consciousness is only transitive over short distances of time is a phenomenological fact that simply has to be accepted. (168)

 

And yet

However, although this means that we cannot appeal to the nature of co-consciousness in arguing for synchronic transitivity, the case for the latter is supported by the fact that breakdowns in transitivity are closely linked, and quite possibly essentially linked, to the way temporality is manifest in experience. (168)

Dainton notes that spatially synchronic contents are present together, but diachronic ones are not. (268) But “However, although this means that we cannot appeal to the nature of co-consciousness in arguing for synchronic transitivity, the case for the latter is supported by the fact that breakdowns in transitivity are closely linked, and quite possibly essentially linked, to the way temporality is manifest in experience?” (269)

7.3 Durations and thresholds

But even in our Foster model, things are not so simple because each unit of time is subdivided into many more. “their existence does raise the question of just how many total experiences occur between any two total experiences which overlap”. (169) There could be infinitely many more between any two, no matter how close [and thus be too complex]

Since these intervening experiences overlap, there is no problem with repeated contents, but their existence does raise the question of just how many total experiences occur between any two total experiences which overlap. If total experiences occur in dense successions, then between any pair of them, no matter how close together, there will always be another that is distinct from either. In which case, there will always be an infinity of total experiences between any two, with the consequence that no total experience has an immediate successor. Since these intervening experiences overlap, there is no problem with repeated contents, but their existence does raise the question of just how many total experiences occur between any two total experiences which overlap. If total experiences occur in dense successions, then between any pair of them, no matter how close together, there will always be another that is distinct from either. In which case, there will always be an infinity of total experiences between any two, with the consequence that no total experience has an immediate successor. (169)

But Dainton thinks it is inconceivable that one tone can have infinitely many distinct phenomenal tone-phases.

We will assume that the span of immediate experience is two notes long. One total experience, call it E, is centred on the note Re. The content of this experience is [one half of Do, Re, one half of Mi]. The very first total experience that occurs is [Do-Re] and the last is [Re-Mi]. Call these E- and E+ respectively. If total experiences were densely ordered, on either side of E there would be an infinite number of distinct total experiences, an infinite number between both E- and E, and between E and E+. If this were the case, the single tone Do would comprise an infinite number of distinct phenomenal tone-phases (likewise, of course, for Re and Mi). This is hard to believe. Can we really distinguish, in introspection, an infinite number of distinct phases of a single short tone, or a perceived movement? Is there any introspective evidence that we can distinguish even a hundred? Physicists currently believe that intervals of time below the Planck duration of 10-43 seconds have no physical significance—is it likely that such intervals have any phenomenological significance? (170)

Also consider some empirical findings. When repeated stimuli happen quickly enough, they are perceived as one. For example two repeated sounds happening quicker that 2-3 milliseconds are heard as one sound. But this is just for perceiving two instances. In order to perceive their order, for all sense modalities is required 30 milliseconds between them. (170)

Dainton thinks then this prevents the division of experience going to infinity. To be aware of succession might mean that the parts cannot be less than 30 milliseconds long. (170-171)

Yet he notes: “But the legitimacy of purely formal manoeuvre does not mean that all the intervals thus recognized in thought correspond to anything recognizable in experience.” (171)

Finding the duration of the specious present is not so easy to do empirically so we need instead to use introspection. But the continuity of consciousness can still make this difficult.

If I listen to a sequence of notes, and try to gauge whether a given pair of notes X and Y are directly experienced together, even if several notes occur between X and Y, I will experience Y at the end of a continuous period of awareness; I will have been continuously experiencing from the moment X starts through to the moment Y ends. This fact can, I suspect, easily lead to overestimations of the span of immediate experience. The figure of three seconds mentioned earlier is based on people’s ability to discern distinctive, memorable, or pleasing patterns in their experience, temporal gestalts: think of how the notes in a musical phrase, or the words in a line of spoken poetry hang together, or seemingly form natural units, However, given that these patterns extend quite some way through time, there is no guarantee that the beginning and end of a given pattern fall within the scope of immediate experience. For my own part, I would tentatively estimate the duration of my typical specious present to be half a second or less. (171)

 

What qualifies as a total experience is complicated by the fact that there is a variety of different things being thought and perceived each moment. (see 171-172)

When Dainton speaks of moments of consciousenss, by moment he means “some brief interval that is shorter than the specious present.” Also there are co-conscious cross-overs. In one moment our visual and auditory impressions are synchronically co-conscious. In two moments, our auditory moments are co-conscious with one another and our visual moments are co-conscious with one another, because their moments overlap. But also in two moments, the auditory impression of the first moment is co-conscious with the visual impression of the second moment. (see 172)

The interval of the specious present might different for other species or for different people or the same person at different times. (172)

7.4 Symmetry, flow and mode

It is possible that the overlap theory is phenomenological inadequate. (173)

[In this next paragraph, Dainton says that phenomenal time is both symmetrical but has a direction. (Later he speaks of asymmetricality so maybe my copy has a mistake). Often times the directionality of time is said to be what makes it asymmetrical, it flows one way and not both, so Dainton does not mean symmetrical in that sense here, but rather probably in the structural sense. Our consciousness is in flow. That means at every moment we are in transition. This means that every moment is overlapping with its neighbors. A succeeding moment then is happening now just as much as the passing-away moment is diminishing. Maybe something like a bell curve, and symmetrical in that sense.]

Co-consciousness within a stream may not be transitive, but it is symmetrical. In the sequence Do-Re (without a gap), Do is co-conscious with Re, but it is equally the case that Re is co-conscious with Do. Yet when we hear the sequence, we experience the notes as occurring in a definite temporal order: we first hear Do and then hear Re. But we do not merely first hear Do, and then hear Re whilst simultaneously remembering hearing Do a moment before, we hear Do giving way to Re, we hear the first note flow into the second note. The transition between the notes is directly experienced, and it is experienced as occurring in a particular direction. It is not only the transition from one note to the next that has this feature: an individual auditory sensation itself exhibits flow. For the short time it lasts, the tone seems to be extruding itself forward into the future. All types of experience which possess noticeable duration exhibit a similar characteristic. A pain may be unvarying in its painful character, but it seems to endure in a particular direction, as the same pain-content is continually renewed from moment to moment. The same applies to other bodily sensations. When nothing is changing within our visual field, our visual sensory-contents are also being continuously renewed; even if we do not reflect on the situation, there is a constant (non-attentive) passive awareness of the scene before us continuing on in its unchanged state. When we see an object move, say from P1 to P2, then from P2 to P3, we see the latter movement as smoothly continuing on from the former. The same applies to remembered and imagined sensations and perceptions. Thought to take place sequentially: we are aware of one thought giving way to the next, then the next. Consciousness as a whole has a phenomenally manifest flowing character; this is why the stream metaphor seems so apt. How can we account for this feature of phenomenal flow or passage in the context of the overlap theory? Since the temporal asymmetry is phenomenal, we cannot appeal to memory, and since co-consciousness is symmetrical with respect to time, co-consciousness cannot be the answer. (173)

 

The representational theories like the ones of Broad and Husserl explain phenomenal passage as being a matter of the modes of contents changing from present to past. But Dainton’s overlap theory does not recognize temporal modes. If parts from one experience to the next did not match in mode, then it does not make sense to say that they overlap.

When we say that Re occurs in two different total experiences, E1=[Do-Re] and E2=[Re-Mi], we are talking about numerically the same experience. If Re in E1 possessed a different phenomenal character from Re in E2, it would make no sense to say that these two total experiences overlapped: the Re in E1 would be a numerically distinct experience from the Re in E2. (174)

 

Lockwood thinks that theories of phenomenal time must accommodate temporal modes, because temporal modes explain how things pass in and out of the present. (174)

Dainton has three reasons to think that a content apprehended at different times does not thereby have different intrinsic phenomenal characteristics [like pastness presentness and futureness]. (174)

 

1. Dainton already showed that the phenomenal properties of pastness and presentedness are problematic.

2. Dainton thinks that the durratin of immediate experience is short, like half a second. [This immediate present would have a center of most presentedness that trails of to the limit of the present, along a series of degrees of presentedness.] If there were 10 degrees of presentedness, then in that half second each degree of variation would last a 20th of a second. But it is not likely Dainton thinks that we can perceive such fine and fast variation of such a phenomenal property. This might be easier to conceive for longer term phenomena like an entire melodic line, but that does not mean it makes sense for the immediate present. (175)

3. Different moments do however have external relations. Maybe this is really what accounts for what seems to be changing modality?

We have a problem with the overlap model. We can explain how moments are unified on the basis of co-consciousness, but co-consciousness does not seem to explain why there is asymmetrical order of succession. (175)

Dainton notes that immediate experience in this model is not momentary, which means it has a duration, which furthermore means that the contents have intrinsic temporal organization. And the temporal pattern of the contents is dynamic, because if in one immediate present we see an object move from one point to another, we do not see it at both points at once, rather we see it move between them.

According to the overlap theory, most contents of immediate experience are not momentary, they possess some short duration, and consequently these | temporal pattern. What is the character of these temporal patterns—is it static or dynamic? The answer is clear: it is dynamic, the flow or passage in experience is included in the phenomenal content of experience. The total experience that results from my seeing a ball move between P1 and P2 does not consist of stationary image of the ball at two different places. The content is a ball moving. Movement or animation is, as it were, built into the content from the start. It is similar for auditory experience. When I hear the note Do, the content of my immediate experience is a note enduring. (175-176)

So we can thus explain how the overlap model accounts for temporal order. One moment sees the ball go from P1 to P2. the next moment from P2 to P3. These acts of awareness overlap. Thus the order of P1 P2 P3 is maintained in the constant overlapping flow. (176)

Thus: “the fact that co-consciousness is symmetrical with respect to time is quite compatible with experience itself possessing an inherent direction: all that is required is for co-conscious experiences to have contents which are not symmetrical with respect to time. And clearly, the contents of our experience have this feature.” (176)

[Also the extrinsic relations of coming before and after are enough to explain their temporal distinction. The need not be intrinsic properties of presentedness] (177)

The link between phenomenal temporality and non-transitive co-consciousness remains intact, and Dainton further discusses its nature. (177)

7.5 Passage within a four-dimensional world

Dainton then examines the four-dimensional or block view of the universe, which says that “every moment and event is equally real, the future exists as much as the present or past; there is no such thing as a ‘moving present’ | gliding smoothly forward along the time-line of history.” Dainton says that even if we presume the block view, the phenomenon of passage can still be real. (178)

 

Dainton continues this analysis, which would be interesting for those who want to know how the block view is compatible with the overlap model. (see 177-179)

7.6 Time, awareness and simultaneity

Recall again the Principle of Simultaneous Awareness (PSA). We experience a past event not as being simultaneous with the present but rather we simultaneously are aware both of the present moment and the past ones as past moments no longer active in the present.

There are two reasons PSA seems compelling. 1) it makes a distinction between the succession of experiences and the experience of succession. 2) for us to be continuously aware of the continuity of our consciousness, we must at each instant be aware of some temporally extended portion of our experience. (180)

In overlap theory every temporally extended experience is an experience of succession. (180)

Now recall PPC. [“To make sense of the character of our experience, we have been forced to adopt the view that acts of awareness and their contents exactly coincide in time; they run concurrently. This is the doctrine enshrined in the Principle of Presentational Concurrence, PPC.”] Overlap theory embraces PPC. To experience continuity means that the experience must have duration. This is impossible in momentary consciousness.  (180)

Dainton then has us conduct an exercise where we rotate in our imagination our visual field 90 degrees not in space but in time [somehow]. (180) He later concludes “The overlap theory does not make the mistake of spatializing temporal awareness. For the overlap theory, change within experience is experienced only as it occurs, over a period of time.” (181)

Dainton then concludes by summarizing the chapter and  mentioning other related topics that are not directly relevant to the current project. (181-182)

 

Barry Dainton. Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Ch. 6 of Dainton’s Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience, “Broad and Husserl”, summary

 

by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]

[The Dainton – Gallagher Phenomenal Time Debate, entry directory]

[Dainton’s Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience, entry directory]

[All boldface, underlining, and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is forthcoming; currently there are mistakes.]

Summary of

Barry Dainton

Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience

Chapter 6: 
Broad and Husserl

 

Brief Summary: Broad and Husserl propose models of time consciousness with early and late versions. Dainton compares them to see how certain properties create and avoid problems in their accounts.

 

Summary

 

6.1. A curious tale

 

Dainton will examine the phenomenologies of time consciousness in Broad and Husserl. There pose similar theories, but also Husserl’s and Broad’s views on time consciousness changed throughout their writings. (136) Their views evolved invertedly, so later Husserl is more like early Broad and vice versa. “Broad’s early account is realist, his later account anti-realist; Husserl seems to have moved in the opposite direction” (136)

Both tried to combine the awareness-content model with the Principle of Simultaneous Awareness (PSA), but learned that together they are untenable, so one must be removed. (136) Dainton thinks the problematic component is PSA, but when we remove it, we as well take away the motivation for subscribing to the awareness-content model. (136d)

Dainton explains that his treatment of Husserl will necessarily be a simplification. (137a)

6.2 Broad: the early account

 

Broad’s early account of temporal awareness is simple but baffling. It is based on the awareness-content distinction. "in Broad’s terms, there are acts of sensing and their sensible (or phenomenal) contents, or sensa.” (137) This awareness senses change and persistence in our experiential contents. Quoting Broad: “There is no doubt that sensible motion and rest are genuine unanalysable properties of visual sensa. I am aware of them as directly as I am aware of the redness of a red patch, and I could no more describe them to anyone who had never sensed them than I could describe the colour of a pillarbox to a man born blind. (1923:287)”. (137) Broad also here thinks there is the specious present, quoting  him again “‘what can be sensed at any moment stretches a little way back behind that moment. This…the Specious present’ (1923:348).” (137) So Broad thinks there are no momentary acts of awareness, because “all actual acts have some small but finite duration.” (137) For the sake of argument, Broad assumes there are momentary acts. But they take as their object temporally extended phenomenal contents. Dainton then reproduces (with relabeling) Broad’s diagram.

[Image from page 138 of Barry Dainton, (2000).]

 

Line O1, O2, O3 are O’s successive acts of awareness. The bottom horizontal line A, B, etc. are the contents of these acts of awareness. O1 is O’s act of awareness at time t1. The content of this act is the line segment AC. So while O1 is a momentary act of consciousness, the content of O1 is a “temporally extended stretch of phenomenal content.” (138). “So in a single instant O is aware of a temporally extended phenomenal content, for example an enduring tone, or a patch of light moving some way across his visual field.” (138). And similarly this holds for O2 and so on. But notice how O2’s content overlaps with O1’s, as they both share content BC.  [Momentary acts O1 and O3 only share a moment of content C.]

[Image from page 138 of Barry Dainton, (2000), here modified with color]

But for Broad, there are not momentary acts but rather continuous processes. In this case there is awareness process O1-O2. Because they are taken as a pair, the contents exclusive to each are not a part of their joint awareness. So O1-O2 is aware just of BC. “Athough O2 apprehends content which occurs after C, right on up until D, since O1 ends at C nothing beyond this point is apprehended by O1. So the content which is sensed throughout the duration of O1-O2 is restricted to their period of overlap, BC.” (138) Imagine if the duration periods were shorter. This would make the overlaps more overlapping, and vice versa. (138-139)

 

 

 

Assessment

One problem with Broad’s model are obscurities. It is not evident how long a continuous process of sensing can last. Now regarding the content sensed through a continuous act, like O1-O2, let’s call it the ‘core content’ of the act. O1-O2’s core content is BC. The total content is everything that the act is aware of, even if it is not continuously shared. Dainton calls this the ‘total content’ of the act. So the total content of O1-O2 is AD. The smallest possible content would have the duration of the specious present and it could only be apprehended by a momentary act. Yet “One of the peculiarities of Broad’s account is that although core contents have the distinguishing property of specious presents, they are temporally extended and are sensed as a whole, Broad doesn’t call them specious presents. He reserves this label for the limiting case which can never occur.” (139)

[Recall The Principle of Presentational Concurrence, or PPC, which says that “the duration of a content being presented is concurrent with the duration of the act of presenting it” (134)] Another oddity results from Broad’s rejection of PPC, for he claims that the contents of the acts of awareness are longer than the acts themselves. Broad thinks that within acts there can be smaller acts of finite duration. But as we noted, shorter acts overlap more with each other. So in the diagram below, first consider the longer act O1-O4. There is just a tiny overlap, QR. However O2-O3 has a larger overlap, PS.

[Images from page 140 of Barry Dainton, (2000), color modified.]

But this does not match our phenomenological experiences. “It does not seem that over very short intervals I am aware of longer stretches of the process than I am over longer periods.” (140)

Another strange consequence. BC is apprehended throughout the temporally extended process O1-O2.

 

[Image from page 138 of Barry Dainton, (2000), here modified with color]

“Since the extended act O1-O2 does not even overlap B-C, we only start to be aware of BC as a whole from the moment when B-C is wholly in the past. The same applies to all extended contents: they enter our awareness only when they are completed and in the past. This is certainly counter-intuitive.” (140)

Dainton now notes a way that Broad’s theory is damagingly problematic. (141) First assume there are momentary acts of consciousness. Now imagine there is a constant auditory tone from A to E. If there is a single sharp click between B and C, it will be heard by two distinct acts of consciousness, O1 and O2; it will be heard twice when in fact it strikes only once. (141) 

Broad does not think there are momentary acts of consciousness. Still here the click will be heard by both extended acts O1-O2 and O2-O3. (141-142)

Dainton’s solution is to say that the acts are not discrete but rather overlapping. He will discuss this model more later, but first he will look at Broad’s solutions. (142)

6.3 Broad: the later account

Broad uses the concept of ‘prehending’, which means being directly aware of something, “having it immediately before one’s consciousness or awareness.” (142) Dainton will simplify the discussion and speak of “‘awareness’ and the objects and contents of awareness.” (142d)

Broad “begins with two assumptions. The first is that the present is a durationless instant, the second that we are directly aware of things changing and remaining unchanged.” (143a) But there is a problem if both are true. A momentary awareness is aware of singular moments and thus not changes or unchangings. So Broad says our awareness has a finite duration, extending “a short way into the past.” (143) Broad then introduces another idea, presentedness, which is “a psychological characteristic which comes in varying degrees from zero up to a maximum.” (143) If a content C is spread through time, then it as a whole cannot all be present, as the present is a durationless instant. So at one moment of C, we are directly aware of one instant of its presentation, and this part is the most present. Moving aware from that center-point, the moments diminish in presentedness with each movement down the chain. It tapers off to the point “where C no longer falls within the span of immediate awareness.”  (143) “As contents slip into the past, we sense them fading away, they appear less vivid, less intense; or perhaps it is because we are aware of contents losing their intensity that they seem to slip away into the past.” (143)

In the forgoing we have been examining “Broad calls the ‘extensive’ aspect of the specious present: how a single momentary awareness takes in a temporal spread of phenomena.” (143) We turn now to the ‘ transitory’ aspect of the specious present, which is “the manner in which specious presents succeed one another, and how they relate to one another when they do so.” (143) Broad makes three assumptions: 1) “all specious presents of the same subject are of the same duration,”

2) “the maximum degree of presentedness is the same for all specious presents,” and

3) “the degree of presentedness decreases continuously and uniformly to zero between the later and earlier boundaries of any specious present.” (143)

Broad also claims that there are no intervals between specious presents, and thus from moment to moment in one single stream of  consciousness, there are no sudden changes in presentedness (143-144). Dainton has us consider if specious presents were temporally adjacent but non-overlapping. In this case, each specious present is the apprehension of an extent of content that has the greatest presentedness in the instant of enaction but trailing from it is a continuum of diminishingly present prior moments. [So it seems we would imagine the triangle diagram as having triangles that do not overlap, and they diminish, but that means the high presentedness of the current moment is adjacent to the least present moment of the next specious present] (144a) This would also hold even if there was overlap but the specious presents were separated by gaps. [Thus we must think of the acts themselves as overlapping and proceeding continuously, fading in and out of present enactment, if we want there to be a continuous awareness of presentedness.] “Clearly, if presentedness is continuous, if we are continuously aware of a spread of content, stretching a short way back in time, with uniformly decreasing degrees of presentedness, then co-streamal specious presents must themselves be continuous, there can be no temporal gaps separating them. Thus successive co-streamal specious presents form a compact series: no specious present has an immediate successor, and between any two co-streamal specious presents, no matter how close together, there is an infinity of others.” (143)

[Image from page 144 of Barry Dainton, (2000)]

Dainton shows this with diminishing bands (fig. 6.3). “The diagram shows how the same contents are apprehended as possessing different degrees of presentedness in successive specious presents which overlap in content. […] Although a given content is sensed as a whole throughout some finite period of time, throughout this period it will be sensed as sinking continuously into the past.” (145)

6.4 Connectedness and presentedness

We now compare Broad’s early and later models. “Broad no longer believes momentary acts are mere fictions; he now takes the view that an extended stream of consciousness consists of a compact series of momentary acts.” (145) Where previously the same content is apprehended the same way at different moments, in the new model the same content is apprehended as diminishing in presentness as it trails away.

And because Broad now sees all acts as momentary, it no longer has the problem of shorter acts apprehending longer stretches of content, and it also does not have the problem of apprehending the same content more than once. (146)

But something is sacrificed for these gains, because Broad here moves from realism to anti-realism (with respect to the reality of phenomenal time; are there only durationless instants or are their temporal extensions of consciousness that extend outside an immediate punctual present?) “If a phenomenal tone Mi has different phenomenal characteristics when apprehended in different specious presents, it makes no sense to think that one and the same phenomenal object occurs in those specious presents. In the earlier theory, Broad held that Mi did not alter its phenomenal characteristics from specious present to specious present, but he now holds that that Mi would have different phenomenal characteristics in different specious presents: it varies in different degrees of presentedness. While this neatly avoids the repeated contents problem, it does make it difficult to see how it is one and the same phenomenal item that is being apprehended throughout this process of sensing.” (146)

One option to solve this problem is to “loosen the individuation conditions for phenomenal contents.” Consider for example how the same house appears larger or smaller depending on how far away we view it. Likewise, perhaps the same phenomenal content appears more or less present depending on how recently we apprehended it. (146d) But Dainton finds a problem with this. It cannot be that it is one and the same content that appears differently in the same moment [Perhaps Dainton is saying this: Mi right now appears to have a certain degree of presentedness, but in the prior moment it had slightly more. However since Mi is one and the same content, what it was in the past is still the same thing that what it is now, and in that way, both variations are present in its identity. But one and the same thing cannot contain contrary predicates, in this case having both one and another degree of presentedness, so the prior instance is right now a representation of Mi and not Mi itself.]

Suppose that Mi is first apprehended at t1 by act O1 with maximal presentedness. Can we make sense of the idea that this phenomenal tone undergoes changes in presentedness over time? Can an item that exists at a certain time t1 possess at this time different and incompatible properties? An item within a sense field, such as a red patch, can change over time; the patch could shrink or expand. We could view the expanding/shrinking patch as a phenomenal continuant, one and the same object possessing different properties at different times. But in supposing that when we apprehend Mi as possessing different degrees of presentedness we are apprehending one and the same tone-content, we are supposing that this content possesses different and incompatible intrinsic properties at the same time. This is impossible. We should conclude, I think, that as ‘Mi’ is apprehended by later acts O2, O3, etc., although it is apprehended as occurring at t1, given that these acts apprehend ‘Mi’ as possessing different degrees of presentedness, they are not apprehensions of the same phenomenal item as was apprehended by O1 But if O2 is not an apprehension of the originally sensed Mi, what is it an apprehension of? There seems to be only one answer: some kind of representation of the originally sensed Mi, a representation which is simultaneous with O2. (If this representation of Mi occurred simultaneously with the original Mi at t1, then presumably both contents would be apprehended by O1, which does not happen.) Instead of successive acts being apprehensions of numerically identical contents, successive acts must be apprehensions of representations of contents, with each representation being apprehended by only one act of awareness. It seems that, knowingly or not, Broad has adopted the second strategy for accommodating PSA we discerned earlier: the representational anti-realist strategy. In itself, this does not mean his theory is false, it just means it is not the kind of theory one might initially take it to be. (147)

Broad’s representationalist theory is similar to the nested short-term memory account we discussed in 5.3, and it shares the same problem: “a seemingly unrealistic degree of complexity.” (147)

Previously we noted how Broad claimed that sensible motion and rest are properties of the visual things we sense and we are directly aware of these properties just as much as we are directly aware of the redness of a red patch. But in Broad’s representationalist model, it seems we no longer can be directly aware of change. (148)

Another problem results from his representational model. “Given that the contents of two successive acts such as Ol and O2 are numerically distinct, what is it that connects these two experiences? It seems that there is no direct experiential connection at all.” (148d) “Broad’s theory has the consequence that a stream of consciousness consists of a succession of wholly distinct experiences. The theory thus fails to satisfy the phenomenal binding constraint: the successive phases of a stream of consciousness are not, on this theory, bound together by experience itself.” (149) And there is a deeper problem. “What holds the successive acts together? Are they bound together in experience? It seems not: each act of awareness is wholly discrete from its neighbours. These acts overlap in content, but this is all: within a given act, there is no awareness of the neighbouring acts. Successive acts of awareness are not aware of each other; all they have in common is their content, to the extent that this overlaps.” (149) “If Broad’s theory were true, a stream of consciousness would consist of a sequence of isolated acts, each having no direct awareness of the adjoining acts. It seems, then, that the theory fails to accommodate the experienced unity of consciousness through time.” (149)

Dainton now more closely examines presentedness. On the one hand, we apprehend contents as sliding into the past, while on the other hand, we apprehend them as possessing diminishing degrees of presentedness. “These two phenomena are not merely correlated: contents appear to be sliding pastwards because they are being apprehended as possessing ever-diminishing degrees of presentedness in successive specious presents.” (149) Dainton now wonders if the “variations in the strength of a phenomenal quality could have this effect.” (149) Since Broad does not clarify what presentedness is, Dainton will consider different options. One is “to equate presentedness with phenomenal intensity. Phenomenal qualities of the same type can vary in intensity, or what Hume called ‘force and vivacity’. A sound of a given timbre and pitch can be softer or louder.”  (149) But presentedness is not like this, because it is about how time manifests in our experiences [making something more or less timely, or close to the present moment]. “Take two contents, one with more presentedness than the other. The content possessing the lesser degree of | presentedness will seem to occur before the content possessing the greater degree of presentedness.” (149-150) But consider if we see a color chart showing blue diminish in intensity. The dimmer side does not seem more ‘past’ than the brighter side. Thus Dainton thinks that we cannot assume that diminished intensity is indicative of temporal pastness. (150) “We must conclude that it would be a mistake to equate presentedness with Humean force and vivacity.” (150)

Thus “Since there are no other obvious alternatives, we seem obliged to conclude that presentedness is a sui generis phenomenal property. This property would be such that, first, simultaneously presented contents cannot possess different degrees of it; second, any two co-conscious contents which possess different degrees of it seem to be non-simultaneous; and third, the content with the lesser intensity appears to occur before the content with the greater intensity.” (150) But Dainton sees this as being flawed. “As I noted earlier in connection with the idea that experiences possess a special quality of ‘presence’, when we hear a sound while seeing a colour, we are aware of the auditory and visual characteristics of these contents, but we are not aware of any additional phenomenal characteristic that is common to both. The same applies to other cases, e.g. touch and taste sensations. So the problem is that there just does not seem to be any such property.” (150)

6.5 Husserl on the ‘consciousness of internal time’

Husserl’s extensive and elaborate analyses of phenomenal time evolved over time and he never seemed to settle on one view. So Dainton will not summarize all the various positions but rather just with one account that he worked with, which is interesting in comparison with Broad’s model.

Dainton explains that the basic mechanics of this model by Husserl are similar to those of the later Broad model. Here the stream is made of momentary experiences that contain representations of previous parts of the stream. Moments of consciousness sink into the past, and in that process become representations. But recent representations are ‘retentions’ or ‘primary memories’. Our immediate momentary impression is called the ‘primal impression’, and it is the ‘source point’ in our ongoing temporal stream of awareness. And so simultaneous with the primal impression are the representations of past moments, the retentional modifications.

The basic mechanics of Husserl’s account are similar to that of the later Broad. A stream of consciousness consists of a compact succession of momentary experiences. Each of these momentary experiences contains a representation of the preceding stretch of the stream. As one momentary experience gives way to another, these representations change in a systematic manner, such that phenomenal items seem to occur in the immediate present and then sink into the past. However, unlike Broad, Husserl posits a clear distinction between present experience and the representations of recent experiences, which he calls ‘retentions’ (or sometimes ‘primary memories’). Each momentary experience comprises a momentary primal impression and a simultaneously apprehended sequence of representations, the retentional modifications of preceding primal impressions. The primal impression is ‘the source-point’: it is here that all experience of temporally extended objects originates. [quoting Husserl]

Now within the impression we have to call special attention to the primal impression, over against which there stands the continuum of modifications in primary memorial consciousness. The primal impression is something absolutely unmodified, the primal source of all further consciousness and being. Primal impression has as its content that which the word ‘now’ signifies, insofar as it is taken in the strictest sense. Each new now is the content of a new primal impression. Ever new primal impressions continuously flash forth with ever new matter. (Husserl 1991:70) [from On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, ed. and trans. J.B.Brough, Dordrecht: Kluwer.] (Dainton p.151)

 

The present moment recedes from the present and becomes a representational retention; likewise the other prior ones recede deeper into their nestings.

[Image from p.152 of Dainton (2000)]

Husserl's diagram shows each moment of consciousness C through G on the horizontal line. The vertical line underneath first has the most recent moment now as a retention, and the next most as a retention of a retention, and so on. But in between each lettering we suppose there being many other moments intervening, so the vertical is a continuum of retentions. "Each of these continuums of retentions is a representation of the immediately preceding stream of consciousness." Dainton then writes: "The length of the vertical represents the duration of the specious present: that stretch of the past that is available (in some form) to current awareness." [But of course he does not mean that the moment of conscious E has an extensive duration, that it itself lasts, for the amount of time of the prior rentended moments; for it is momentary in Dainton's interpretation. Thus he must mean it has a 'depth' as long as the vertical rather than a duration, I am supposing.] (152)

Some phenomena extend over multiple points (all probably do) and their retentional ‘tails’ (like comet tails) are found as stretches along the verticals. After the event, like after a musical note passes, no part of it is in our primal awareness. (153)

But unlike Broad, Husserl thinks we can have an awareness of the future, in the form of protentions. Thus Dainton includes the diagonal going up on the right of the diagram to represent protentional awareness. And although our experiences might surprise us, Husserl is right to say that we are not surprised to always find that our experiences continue forward in time. (153)

Husserl notes we are continuously aware of our experience’s continuity. This means 1) the contents of our experience are continuous. And although we perceive sudden changes, still there is continuously a flow of phenomenal content in our awareness. A continuous succession of acts of awareness allows for given contents to successively become ‘more past.’ (153) And 2) we are not only aware of the continuity of the contents, we are also aware of that our awareness of it is continuous as well. This means, for Dainton, that moments in Husserl’s model are aware not just of their contents but also of their neighbors. The retentions and protentions are nests, and

This entire complex undergoes successive modifications in the succeeding momentary experiences. As a result, we are aware at any given instant of not only our present perspective on a sensory object, but of our past perspectives on it as well—we are aware of how the object was apprehended by previous acts of awareness. Consciousness is thus unified over time at the level of acts as well as contents. (154)

6.6 New words, old problems

Dainton will now look at the critical objections leveled at Broad’s model and see how they apply to Husserl’s. We have seen how Husserl avoids one of them [the problem of the awareness of the continuity of the stream]. There are two others Dainton examines:

(a) Broad’s theory has the consequence that awareness of change cannot be as immediate as the awareness of simultaneity.

(b) How can different intensities of ‘presentedness’, a phenomenal quality possessed by contents present in awareness, give rise to the impression that these contents occurred in the past? (154)

Husserl notes Bretano’s theory of temporal experience, which is similar in ways to Broad’s. We have a sensation S and then it ceases. But when S occurs, it also triggers “the automatic production of a series of representations of itself, a process Brentano called ‘original association’.” (154) But because the succession of representations is also a succession of modifications, “to each successive representation of S is added a different ‘temporal determination’, the upshot of which is to make it seem that S occurred at a successively greater remove from the present.” (154) Brentano thinks that our immediate experience of change really happens in the realm of imagination-like ‘phantasy’ representations instead of in our immediate experience. (This is similar to objection a.) Another problem is that representations are apprehended as simultaneous with present ones, but then on what basis do we experience past representations as being past? How are they qualitatively different? Brentano (or his defenders?) say that past contents have a ‘sign’ of the past. Husserl is critical. How does a now consciousness change into a past one? “In response to the reply that the characteristic in question is a ‘sign’ of the past, Husserl is scathing: ‘But this only provides us with a new word’, it leaves unexplained how ‘a consciousness that is supposed to be now comes to be related to a new-now’ (1991:19).” (This is like objection b.) But Husserl’s model is still vulnerable to these attacks. (155)

So return to objection (a), “Broad’s theory has the consequence that awareness of change cannot be as immediate as the awareness of simultaneity.” But still for Husserl the only immediately given content of consciousness is found in the present moment and all the others are indirectly apprehended retentionally.

Now consider objection (b), “How can different intensities of ‘presentedness’, a phenomenal quality possessed by contents present in awareness, give rise to the impression that these contents occurred in the past?” Husserl says that we perceive or intend retentions as being past (unlike raw intentions) but they are intended as real (unlike memory or imaginings) and thus in a sense are present. (153) “Retentions present the past, memory represents it. That is, retentions provide us with access to the just-past in our current experience.” (155)

But Husserl does not explain how retention can give us the past in immediacy. (155-156)

Dainton then wonders if it is possible for us “to detect in our own experience the postulated complexes of retentions, primal impression and protentions performing their intricate dance?’ (156) Dainton does not think so, and he notes two problems: lingering contents and the clogging of consciousness.

Dainton thinks that present experiences do not linger in our consciousness after they are over, except as retentional images. So for example, if we snap our fingers, the only lingering impression would be from echoes in room, not in his head so to speak. He also says that waving his hand in front of his page makes the words disappear from view. (156) [[This is a curious example and point he is making. On page 129 he writes “Move your hand slowly but smoothly across your field of vision. At each moment you see your hand at a different position; you also see your hand continuously moving. Not only is the movement continuous, but your experience of the movement is continuous: you are directly aware of every perceivable change in your hand’s location in the same way.” He does not make the point here, but when we wave our hand in front of us, we see a blurry trail behind it. These are not memories in our imagination. The past positions of our hands are right there available to our sight in that immediate moment of visual experience. The position of my hand in the prior moment is so vivid in my actual field of vision that it is indiscernible from the present. It in actuality is less present but in virtuality it is equally vivid, or at least its lesser vividness is not discernible to us. We are not talking about a moment that is some finite extend into the past, no matter how small, but a moment that is infinitely close to this one, that cannot possibly be any closer. In the same way, I think in my own reflection that sounds have this trail in my auditory field as well, that even after the sound ends in reality, like when cupping a bell to stop it from ringing, true there is echoing in the room, but that sound is very dim. In my mind I think I hear in fact a very vivid trail of retended impressions. Yet maybe this is unique to my own experience.]] “There may be a faint echo of the snap that lingers on—this depends on the acoustic properties of the environment—but the echo is itself a sound that I am directly experiencing. This is not at all what the theory of retentions leads us to expect.” (156)

Dainton says that the problem is more evident when there are sudden qualitative transitions [[because in these cases prior moments do not bleed into current ones. But I wonder if maybe they do, and the shockingness of the event results from us having to perceive two qualitatively contrary impressions in the same primal impression.]] Dainton then gives another example [that is interesting to us given its similarities with the waving hand trail]

When I let my eyes sweep round the room, I do have an impression of past contents lingering. But this is explicable without recourse to Husserlian retentions. When I look slowly round the room, I continue to be aware of mostly the same objects; what can be seen at one instant overlaps to a large extent with what can be seen an instant later. This is due solely to the width of my visual field. If I turn my head to the right I will eventually lose sight of the coffee cup to my left. But I do not experience the cup fading into the past, rather I experience it moving to the left, towards the periphery of my visual field, until it finally moves out of view. When I lose sight of the cup, I do so completely and all at once. The only ‘fading’ that occurs is due to the blurring of perception at the peripheries of the visual field. But even the indistinct perception of the cup, as it lingers in my peripheral vision, is completely present. Those with tunnel vision will not have the same impression of contents remaining in consciousness: when they turn their heads what they see will change too quickly. To drive this point fully home, try looking round the room but shutting your eyes while doing so. The moment your eyes close, you will of course stop seeing your surroundings immediately. You may, however, experience something else: an afterimage—a | pattern of colour corresponding approximately with what you last saw. But once again, this is in no way the retention, in the Husserlian sense, of a previous primary experience. An afterimage only represents its preceding experience in the vaguest of ways and is itself directly experienced. According to Husserl (and Broad), momentary experiences enjoy their moment of full consciousness, then slip away, becoming less and less present before finally fading altogether—only then, after they have left direct awareness altogether, can they appear in the guise of ordinary memory. This does not seem to happen. Contents depart from immediate experience cleanly, leaving no residue, and become immediately accessible to memory. (156-157)

[[At first Dainton is not talking about afterimages. The cup does not fade into a visual trail like the trail behind a speeding car, which has temporal meaning to it as it leaves on us the impression of movement through time. It instead is receding out of view as his eyes are directed aware from it. But what is interesting is that he says he does not perceive it fading into the past. Even the blurry trail example is still just a fading into a different spatial location, and the temporal meaning is in a way inferred from it or perceptually implied in it, as all moving things of a great enough speed leave a trail of their prior locations. So we are not necessarily perceiving time itself in its continuous recession, but merely we see a record of the object’s prior locations, with the diminishing vivacity as an indirect indicator of the succession of moments during which the object was in those prior places. But his second illustration does discuss after images. We close our eyes and what we see leaves an afterimage. Dainton says it is not a retention in Husserl’s sense of the term, because it is just a representation of the prior experience and is not directly experienced. But if I wave my hand in front of me then close my eyes, in my after image there remains the blurry trail behind my hand. It is true that I am not perceiving the past itself but rather a retention of it. However, it is there in its relative perceptual freshness in immediacy.]]

One possible defense [assuming that we do not directly perceive prior moments of perception in the way I described with the trail behind the hand] is to say that we do have such retentions but they are too brief to notice. Dainton says that in that case why posit them in the first place? (157)

Now for the ‘clogging’ problem. Broad’s model had nesting. There is an awareness not just of the present but as well of the prior moments. Husserl’s nesting goes even further. [Say we have three moments of consciousness C-D-E, one coming after the other in succession. Let’s assume that C is the first moment of our consciousness, with none preceding it. C passes to D. Then at D, we are retentionally aware of C, but primally ware of D. Then D passes to E. We are primally aware of E, and the freshest retention is D, which just happened a moment ago, and next freshest is our retention of C, happening two moments ago. So E is retentionally aware of C even though it happened two moments ago. But consider D. When D happened, it was aware of C as being a moment that happened only one moment ago. So this means that E is directly aware of C being two moments unfresh, but also as being one moment unfresh, because the retended impression of D is an impression of a moment when C was only one moment unfresh. But imagine how complex this gets after many moments have transpired. And also consider that between C and D is implied a countless number of other moments that the diagram cannot display. That for Dainton is far too complex to be like what in our phenomenal experiences is a simple awareness of temporal continuity.]

Thus “a consciousness which contained this degree of internal complexity would be clogged with different contents to a nightmarish degree.” But Husserl does not think in fact there is actually an infinity of such modifications, because they blend into one another. However he does not elaborate more on how the blending happens. But Dainton invites us to suppose it does. [This would mean that the moments lose their discernibility, thus Dainton thinks their phenomenological reality] “His position is now open, once more, to the objection that his retentional complexes have no phenomenological reality; if they cannot be discerned in experience, why posit them?” (158)

 

6.7 Husserl’s change of view

Later Husserl developed his theory partly in effort to remedy these problems. He later becomes concerned with ‘absolute time consciousness’ or ‘the absolute, temporally constitutive flux of consciousness.’ (159)

Dainton now explains this absolute time consciousness. In Husserl’s model, there are two series of unifications within the stream of consciousness; one lies at the level of phenomenal contents and the other at the level of our awareness itself. (159) But such an act-object model needs to account somehow for the continuity of our own awareness. In this new model, our awareness each moment is not just aware of its immediate contents, or of the contents neighboring acts, but rather it is aware of those very neighboring acts themselves. This is because this unity between adjacent moments is a precondition for anything to appear. Other acts however produce synthesis by means of distinct acts of constitution. But this is not so for time consciousness, because it would lead to infinite regress. [If our current act of awareness needed to by linked to the rest by means of an additional act, then this one would be temporal and also need an additional synthetic act and so on. Rather, moments are pregiven already synthesized with their neighbors.] (159)

Husserl says we cannot describe the absolute time consciousness; we can only use metaphors. This is because temporal objects appear in time and we can describe them. However the absolute time consciousness does not itself appear in time. (159-160)

Brough’s interpretation is that Husserl abandon’s his earlier notion of retentions [at least with regard to absolute consciousness]. There are no contents on the level of absolute consciousness. Momentary consciousness does not have past or future contents in its retentional or protentional awareness; rather, it only has those acts themselves in its awareness. (160) So there is the upper level of absolute flux and it cannot be described. There is also the lower level in which there are temporally extended contents that the upper level apprehends. So while before when claiming that only the momentary instant of awareness is real, now he seems to say that phenomenal time is real, because the absolute flow is the continuum of time consciousness which extends beyond the present moment. “Husserl seems to have moved from a representational anti-realism to a full-blown realism”. (161a) Yet Dainton concludes “Unfortunately, since Husserl nowhere elaborates in any detail or with any clarity how at a given moment we can be directly aware of past and future phases of our experience, our positive understanding of time-consciousness could scarcely be said to have advanced.” (161)

 

 

Barry Dainton. Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

 

Ch. 5 of Dainton’s Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience, “Phenomenal time: problems and principles”, summary

by Corry Shores
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Summary of

Barry Dainton

Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience

Chapter 5: 
Phenomenal time: problems and principles

 

Brief Summary: Dainton explains and defends the idea that diachronic co-consciousness accounts for the unity of our stream of consciousness.

 

Summary

 

5.1 Time in experience

Previously Dainton has been describing co-consciousness, [which is the passive indirect awareness of the multiplicity of our consciousness. We are always aware of more than one thing, and as well, we are aware of the togetherness of these different components of our phenomenal awareness.] So far he looked at simultaneous co-conscious contents, but now he looks at successive ones in the continuous succession of experiences in our stream of consciousness.

Consciousness is not a static but a flowing thing, it is never still but always on the move. (113)

Diachronic unity of experience, like the synchronic, arises from co-consciousness. (113) All our experiences at any time belong to the same stream of consciousness. But the co-consciousness itself is fleeting, even if the stream never ends:

Diachronic co-consciousness is a very short-term affair, spanning at most a second or so—the duration of the so-called ‘specious present’. But this brevity does not matter: each link in a chain only passes through the links either side of it, but this does not undermine the chain’s integrity. Diachronic co-consciousness is what binds together the adjacent phases of a stream of consciousness, and so is responsible for the very existence of the stream as a temporally extended whole. (113d)

Dainton calls the DC-thesis the claim that “diachronic co-consciousness is responsible for the experienced unity of streams of consciousness from moment to moment.” (114a)

Dainton has us consider some things. Temporality is part of our awareness when we see movement, focus on the stream of our thinking, or notice the persistence of a phenomenon.

Whenever we see movement, our visual experience has a temporal character; the content of such an experience is as much temporal as it is spatial. It is not just in perception that we directly experience change. Thinking, as an activity, involves a continuous succession of occurrent thoughts and mental images, irrespective of whether the content or subject matter of these is continuous or fragmented. Moreover, the succession of thoughts and perceptions is itself something we experience; the succession is not just a succession of experiences, it is a succession within experience. I said that we also directly experience persistence, a fact which may be slightly less obvious, until it is pointed out. Think of what it is like to hear an unvarying auditory tone. Even though the tone does not vary in pitch, timbre or volume, we directly experience the tone continuing on. It is as though, from moment to moment, there is a continual renewal of the same auditory content, a renewal which is directly experienced. Or think of an unvarying yet enduring pain sensation; for as long as the pain is felt, it is felt as a continuous presence; this presence is not static but dynamic, it is an enduring presence. This experienced flow or passage is common to all sensations; indeed, a sensation lacking this characteristic seems inconceivable—perhaps this is why a strictly durationless sensory experience, existing all by itself, seems impossible to conceive. I have been concentrating on particular types of experience, but what holds of particular types of experience also holds of the stream of consciousness as a whole: every part of it exhibits the same dynamic characteristics; the stream as a whole, from moment to moment, undergoes passage; it flows as a whole, and it does so for as long as it lasts. (114)

These examples illustrate what Dainton calls phenomenal temporality.

The fact that we directly experience both change and continuity suggests that contents spread over a brief interval of time can be co-conscious; the fact that our experience consists of a continuously renewed flow of content, a flow within experience itself, suggests that diachronic co-consciousness plays a key role in the generation of streams of consciousness. (114)

Dainton will now consider explanations that are not the DC-thesis, that is, that explain these temporal phenomena as resulting from diachronic co-consciousness. Such alternate arguments reject “one or both of the following doctrines:

(a) that experiences have genuine temporal duration;

(b) that successive experiences can be directly co-conscious.” (114-115)

If someone rejects both then they are rejecting phenomenal temporality [because our experiences neither happen across time nor would we be aware of that in the first place]. Dainton calls this position anti-realism [about phenomenal temporality. They do not think that phenomenal temporality is a real thing.] “Although immediate experience seems to extend a short way through time, the anti-realist maintains that this is merely an appearance which can be explained away.” (115) However,  “Realists about phenomenal temporality, by contrast, accept both (a) and (b).” There is a third position between them, partial anti-realism, which says that “although experience is not confined to momentary time-slices, something other than co-consciousness is responsible for the binding of temporally extended total experiences into streams. This position embraces the phenomenal or specious present, but rejects the DC-thesis.” (115) Dainton will argue against these anti-realisms in favor of his realism about phenomenal temporality.

 

Dainton will consider case studies of phenomenal time. (115)

 

Dainton begins with a constraint that he calls the phenomenological constraint. He thinks it is an obvious truth that our experience of change is just as immediate as other experiences.

 

our experience of change is just as immediate as our experience of shape or colour. I take this to be an obvious truth, and will refer to it as the phenomenological constraint. (115)

 

Dainton recognizes that “the possibility that an account of the unity of experience across time requires ingredients that are not needed in an account of the unity of simultaneous experiences.” (116) For example, he previously argued against the A thesis, which says that experience involves an awareness content distinction. He did this in the context of synchronic co-consciousness, but we will need to reevaluate it now for diachronic co-consciousness. (116)

Dainton’s primary concern in these investigations of phenomenal time is the unity consciousness. He "will be dealing with some of the various accounts that have been given of the specious present, that brief expanse of immediate awareness which is also known as the living, sensible or phenomenal present.” (116) Dainton then provides some beautiful passages from James and Broad and comments on how they seem to express this notion of the present.

the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were— a rearward- and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it. (James 1952:399)

If it is really necessary to have some image, perhaps the following may save us from worse. Let us fancy ourselves in total darkness hung over a stream and looking down on it. The stream has no banks, and its current is covered and filled with continuously floating things. Right under our faces is a bright illuminated spot on the water, which ceaselessly widens and narrows its area, and shows us what passes away on the current. And this spot that is light is our now, our present…. We have not only an illuminated place, and the rest of the stream in total darkness. There is a paler light, which both up and down stream, is shed on what comes before and after our now. And this paler light is the offspring of the present. Behind our heads there is something perhaps which reflects the rays from the lit up now, and throws them dimly upon past and future. Outside this reflection is utter darkness…the now and here, in which the real appears, | are not confined within simply discrete and resting moments. They are any portion of that continuous content with which we come into direct relation. Examination shows that not only at their edges they dissolve themselves over into there and then, but that even within their limits as first given, they know no repose. Within the here is both here and there; and in the ceaseless process of change in time you may narrow your scrutiny to the smallest focus, but you will find no rest. (Bradley 1922: vol. 1, 54–6)

There are questionable elements in each of these descriptions, but both capture something of the phenomenon. We have an immediate experience only of what is present, a present that is surrounded by the comparative darkness of the remembered past and the anticipated future; the experienced present is not momentary, we seem to be directly aware of intervals of time as wholes; within these wholes there is a continual flow of content, and each experienced whole seamlessly gives way to the next. (116-117)

5.2 Continuity in question

Dainton wonders

The experienced passage of time sometimes slows to a crawl and sometimes speeds along; our sensory experience is far more intense and varied at some times than it is at others—periods of heightened emotion or intellectual activity are counterbalanced by periods of relative quiescence. Such variations are compatible with the idea that our consciousness is nonetheless characterized by continuous flow. (117)

Strawson calls this into question:

Strawson writes:

I think William James’s famous metaphor of the stream of consciousness is inept. Human thought has very little natural phenomenological continuity or experiential flow—if mine is anything to go by. ‘Our thought is fluctuating, uncertain, fleeting’, as Hume said…It keeps slipping from mere consciousness into self-consciousness and out again | (one can sit through a whole film without emerging into I-thinking self-consciousness). It is always shooting off, fuzzing, shorting out, spurting and stalling. William James described it as like a bird’s life… an alternation of flights and perchings’…but even this recognition that thought is not a matter of even flow retains a strong notion of continuity…It fails to take adequate account of the fact that trains of thought are constantly broken by detours—by by blows—fissures—white noise. This is especially so when one is just sitting and thinking. (1997:421)

 

Dainton notes that Strawson here is talking about conscious thought which indeed exhibits discontinuities. But Dainton is instead talking about phenomenal time consciousness, so Strawson’s observation is not incompatible with Dainton’s claim that “consciousness taken as wholes exhibit phenomenal continuity” (118).

Danton then notes that

Strawson continues in a more threatening vein:

When I am alone and thinking I find that my fundamental experience of consciousness is one of repeated returns into consciousness from a state of complete if momentary unconsciousness. The (invariably brief) periods of true experiential continuity are usually radically disjunct from one another in this way even when they are not radically disjunct in respect of content. (It is in fact often the same thought—or nearly the same thought—that one returns to after a momentary absence.) The situation is best described, it seems to me, by saying that consciousness is continually restarting. There isn’t a basic substrate (as it were) of continuous consciousness interrupted by various lapses and doglegs. Rather, conscious thought has the character of a (nearly continuous) series of radically disjunct irruptions into consciousness from a basic substrate of non-consciousness. It keeps banging out of nothingness; it is a series of comings to. (1997:422)

Dainton disagrees with Strawson’s claim that there are breaks in consciousness by noting how whether it be focal or peripheral awareness, they are continuous.

This is not what I find at all. My thinking is often scrappy and inchoate, but it takes place in the context of a relatively constant and continuous mass of peripheral experience, bodily, emotional and perceptual, which together constitute the phenomenal background. The phenomenal | background is rarely noticed, but it is nonetheless a constant—and constantly flowing—presence in our consciousness. When my line of thought takes a detour, for example when without noticing I pass from trying to formulate this sentence to indulging in a few moments of daydreaming, I do not find myself in total silence or darkness or bereft of any bodily feeling; the course of my thinking alters, my mental imagery alters, perhaps the focus of my attention alters, but everything else remains much the same.(118-119)

And Dainton later concludes:

So Strawson is right to this extent: so far as both conscious thought and self-conscious awareness are concerned, our streams of consciousness contain frequent discontinuities and many a sudden eruption. But they are also characterized by an enduring constancy and continuity, albeit at the level of the largely unnoticed phenomenal background. (120)

 

5.3 Experience, the present, and presence

 

Dainton will now consider a line of reasoning that would support the idea that consciousness is momentary.

Of course our immediate direct experience is limited to the present. We wonder, how long is does the present last? Augustine thought it had no duration, and thus shared nothing with the future and past. Give the present some finite extent, it will have the past at one end and the future on the other; thus

the present, strictly speaking, must be a durationless interface between past and future, between what was but is no more, and what will be but is not yet. Now, if experience is confined to the present, and the present is durationless, it seems experience must be literally instantaneous. (120)

Dainton calls this the Augustinian argument, and the term ‘specious present’ stems from this argument.

Dainton notes that the idea of a durationless present is used in physics.

We talk of present-day trends or standards of living; we talk of the present epoch, the developments now taking place elsewhere, the changes now occurring in the Earth’s atmosphere. In doing so, we are obviously not talking about durationless instants; we are referring to processes or states that endure. But I shall not press this point. Although the notion of the durationless present is to some extent artificial, it also seems an intelligible one in certain contexts, for example the description of movement in physics. (121)

Dainton will now focus on what it means to say that experience is always present. (121)

This could mean that “we cannot, at a given time, be immediately aware of events that are happening at other times.” (121) But even if our experiences only happen in the present, that is, only happen when they happen, that still can mean that the present is extended, experience does not necessarily need to be instantaneous. [This is perhaps because if the present in its reality is understood as temporally extended, then our experiences in the temporal present can as well extend]

A pain sensation is felt when it occurs. One cannot feel a pain before it begins or after it has ended. But this really only amounts to saying that a pain happens when it happens, or more generally, experiences happen when they happen. This tautology does not establish that experience is necessarily instantaneous, for if there were temporally extended experiences, they too would happen when they happen, i.e. they would occupy one stretch of time rather than another. It is true that a temporally extended sensation would | have earlier and later phases, as do all extended processes. But why should adjacent phases not be co-conscious? The earlier and later phases of most processes are related, for example by causation. Relationships as such are not restricted to holding between simultaneous items; why should coconsciousness be any different? (121-122)

Another way to defend this Augustinian argument is to say that the past and future do not exist, and only the present instant exists. Dainton thinks that while we might call into question the existence of future events [as they have not yet actually happened] we cannot question the fact that past events actually did happen and thus exist [as real events that have passed].

 

Dainton will now address a second factor, the conflation of the present with presence, and possible errors that can follow. Dainton has been using

the term ‘presence’ to denote the property of being an immediate object or content of consciousness. Everything that is immediately present in a subject’s experience possesses presence in this sense: it is just there within one’s consciousness. Now, I can see nothing wrong in saying that experience has ‘presence’ if this is meant only to draw attention to the sheer immediacy of what is being currently experienced. (122)

The first error that might result is that we think only current experience has presence. Rather, past experience, when they were happening also exhibited presence. (122-123)

The other error is thinking that presence can only be in the present instant, because even if time were a series of durationless instants, phenomenal presence could still extend across a multiplicity of them.

The second mistake to avoid is to assume, without further argument, that presence is confined to the present moment. Whereas the notion of an instantaneous present is a concept drawn from a mathematical (or quasimathematical) way of thinking about time as a dimension, the notion of presence is connected with experience. The fact that we can think of time as consisting of a succession of durationless instants does not entail that phenomenological presence is instantiated instantaneously. If the sensory present has a non-zero duration, presence will also have a non-zero duration. (123)

 

5.4 Memory and the experience of time

Dainton will now look at explanations of time that involve memory. “There is no denying that memory and temporal experience are connected in a number of ways, but it is another thing to hold that memory is largely or wholly responsible for our experience of time. Although it quickly becomes apparent that this is not the case, the reasons why this is so are instructive”.

Our memories tell us how our lives have unfolded and that the moments of our lives have been temporally successive.

Memory thus furnishes us with inside knowledge of how our lives have unfolded over time, and so with a sense of how we arrived at the present moment. Then there is what we might loosely call the ‘experience of passage’. We have the impression that our lives are moving forward, in that we live our lives in the present, with future events getting ever nearer while past events recede. Memory plays a role here too. When we recall an earlier experience, we can also remember (if we try) that this earlier experience was followed by later experiences; we can thus anticipate that our current experience will be followed by future experiences. (123)

However, Dainton does not think that our ongoing phenomenal experience of present time involves memory. (123d)

He has us imagine as best we can that we take a drug that eliminates our long and short term memory. We are only aware of the immediate present. He thinks that we would still imagine in this situation that we have conscious of change. But if the phenomenal present is instantaneous, how could we be aware of changes that take place? [[A change requires two moments and thus awareness of it requires more than momentary consciousness. I challenge this assumption that we would be aware of changes happening over different instants. He seems to be describing something like Leibniz’s mens momentanea, or momentary minds. They retain impressions of their immediate experiences but none beyond the immediate present. They have minds in the sense that they are impressionable (two colliding objects obtain impressions of the forces exchanging through them), but they are momentary minds, because they are not recorded and distinguished from other moments. Using this drug would make us momentary minds. We thus could not possible be conscious of two temporally exclusive moments that are not somehow given in that instant. Using the physics reference he makes, one could see the impact as involving an awareness of two infinitely close instants. But the information of those two instants is still given in a single momentary present. And I can imagine that if I do not retain impressions of even the most recent past moment that I would not be able to perceive motion for example, or changes of other kinds.]]

There is a clear phenomenological difference between seeing a shooting star and remembering seeing a shooting star, and the memorial replay of the experience is itself temporally extended, and so involves the immediate awareness of change. Or so it seems natural to think. To take a different tack, suppose you have been given a drug which over the course of a day gradually and sequentially destroys your experiential memory, without impairing your mental functioning in any other way—for example your factual beliefs are unaffected, your reasoning abilities likewise. First to go are your memories of early childhood; then your school years; soon you can only remember a minute or so back, then a few seconds, then nothing at all. But you continue to be conscious. Although you are now stranded in the immediate sensory present, you hear sounds, you have bodily sensations, you see movement, you feel strangely bewildered. The phenomeno-temporal character of immediate sensory experience is much as it ever was. True, it is impossible to imagine with any clarity what it would be like to be in this condition; but it is easy to believe that one could continue to be conscious, and continue to be directly aware of change. How could this be if the experience of temporality depended on memory? Nonetheless, despite these apparent difficulties, there are philosophers who have assumed that memory can explain the short-term awareness of time (cf. Mellor 1998:122–3).  (Dainton 124)

To elaborate, Dainton has us consider hearing a series of notes, C-D-E-F…. We experience it is a continuous succession. But memory as a simple receptacle of past impressions is not enough to explain why we hear it as a continuous succession. So when we hear E, we remember D, and thus in that way we know it came after. But we don’t necessarily know how much after. And we can also remember a D from months ago, but that is not the one we are comparing the current E with. So we need to also remember not just past things but also their temporal order or temporal distances from one another. [[And that is something a momentary consciousness cannot accomplish. In the mens momentanea model we proposed above, perhaps we can still conceive of this information about temporal depth being recorded. So we are to understand our minds as receiving impressions only in the present but retaining past ones. But as we noted, the present instant contains information about how it is tending into the next instant. And that instant into its next instant. The idea is that the phenomenon of passage is the basic unit of our temporal awareness, and it is given in the smallest possible increment of time, a jump between states of affairs. The present then is not to be understood as being in moment A or B but rather in the infinitely brief passage of time in between them. We thus are given impressions not just of the content of our experiences, we also experience the shock of the immediacy of the transition between moments. That shock is the basic phenomenal content of phenomenal temporality. The basic experience of time is not an experience of one or another thing, but rather of the difference or incompatibility between them. This raw shock tells us not necessarily that something has changed, as that would require more than one present instance of awareness, but rather it tells us that something is now changing, under self-variation from itself.]]

It will help to have a simple example. Imagine the experience of hearing someone play a C major scale on the piano: C-D-E-F…Suppose the scale is played quite quickly, so each note lasts a only short time and is immediately followed by another. Now think of the experience of listening to this scale: a corresponding succession of auditory sensations, C-D-E-F…We hear each tone in turn, but we also hear each tone being followed by another. How could it be that memory is responsible for this experience of succession? One answer comes quickly to mind: when I hear the sequence C-D-E, I have an experience of tone C; this ends and I then hear D while simultaneously remembering hearing C; the experience of D gives way to the experience of E, and while I experience E, I simultaneously remember hearing C and D. But this basic proposal is clearly inadequate. Simply remembering having heard C while I hear D is not enough: this state of affairs is compatible with my having heard C hours or years previously. My memory must register the temporal distance between present and past experiences. What we need to account for is my (apparent) experience that D follows immediately on from C. Likewise for temporal order. I hear C then D then E. The experienced temporal order is something we need to account for. If we try to explain this simply by saying that when I hear E I do so whilst simultaneously remembering having heard C and D, this is compatible with D occurring before or even simultaneously with C. (124)

 

Dainton explains our capacity to know temporal depths in terms of us having beliefs about the temporal orders of past events and thus the depths between distant ones.

When I hear D, after hearing C, I have a memory of hearing C, and accompanying this memory is the belief that C has only just occurred. Similarly, when I hear E, I simultaneously remember hearing both C and D, and the memories of these earlier experiences are accompanied by beliefs: that C occurred just prior to D, and D occurred just prior to E. (125)

But this is incorrect, because we are not explicitly conscious of these beliefs; if we were, we would not be able to also focus on the changes themselves. And if these beliefs were unconscious, then how could we also be conscious of the changes that we observe by means of them?

Dainton then considers the possibility of that immediate short term memory, which is more vibrant than long term memory, could allow for both a durationless present and as well a perception of continuous change. Memory of distantly past things we can call to mind or try to forget. But we cannot do that with our still fresh retentional impressions. One explanation is that this is an involuntary memory. (126)

Dainton then produces an example to show that involuntary short term memory is not enough to explain the experience of change. He argument seems to go like this. Imagine we hear in succession notes C-D-E. We first hear C, and as we then hear D, we produce a short-term memory-image for C. We then hear E, and thereby also produce a short-term memory image for D. But in order to experience change, we need to also be aware not just of past experiences but also of their transition one to another. Thus when hearing E and forming an image of D, we as well form a short-term memory of C-being-followed-by-D. But supposedly we are only aware of the present instant, and upon this limitation still explain the experience of change. Well, if we are only aware of the present instant, then we cannot also be aware of the transition between them. We presume that we experience succession when in fact we were trying to argue that we do not experience more than one moment at once.

This is all rather speculative, but assuming that short-term experience-memory is distinctive, in the ways just outlined—which seems plausible—how might it be put to use in accounting for our experience of change? The account could run something like this. First I hear C; I then hear D, the experience of which is automatically accompanied by a short-term memory-image corresponding to my hearing C; I then hear E, and as I do so I have a short-term memory of C-being-followed-by-D. The problem here is that we have posited a short-term memory of an experience of succession: ‘C-being-followed-by-D’. The sort of experience which the memory-account is meant to eliminate and explain is in fact being presupposed: we cannot remember what we have not already experienced. Also, we must not lose sight of the fact that remembered (and imagined) experiences display the exactly same phenomeno-temporal characteristics as the original experiences. If I remember my experience of hearing C-D-E, three notes occur sequentially in my | auditory imagination. I can ‘replay’ the notes at will, faster or slower, but they always occur in sequence, and I always experience them as occurring in sequence, just as I did when I first heard them. If the memory theorist is prepared to admit that we are directly aware of succession when we remember and imagine, why not admit that we are directly aware of succession in ordinary experience? (127)

To solve this, the memory theorist might propose a model of nested short term memories [perhaps something akin to Husserl’s triangle diagram of retentional consciousness]. At note E, we are simultaneously remembering that we had note D, in which was nested its memory of note C, and so on. [So this explanation seems to regard the awareness of change as an awareness of the nestedness of moments and their order of nesting]

To avoid this problem, the memory theorist could posit nested shortterm memories. When I hear E, I do not have an accompanying memory of C-being-followed-by-D. Rather, as I experience E, I simultaneously have a short-term memory of hearing D, but this memory is not of the note D alone, it is a memory of hearing D whilst simultaneously having a short-term memory of just having heard C. But as with the belief theory, the complexity of this proposal counts against it. Simply hearing the sequence C-D-E does not seem to involve intricate compound memories of the required sort. (127)

Dainton then distinguishing two sorts of claims in these matters: the weak claim says that “experiential memory plays a central and indispensable role in temporal awareness. The strong claim is that temporal awareness is wholly the product of experiential memory.” (127) If we take the strong position, that means when we experience a brief tone C, we know that it extended past a number of instants, and this on account of their remembered layers of nestings. Dainton thinks this is implausible. He cannot conceive of a durationless experience, and he finds it hard to believe that our experience of duration depends on a vast number of nested retentions.

This last point relates to a deeper difficulty. We can distinguish two claims, one weak, one strong. The weak claim is that experiential memory plays a central and indispensable role in temporal awareness. The strong claim is that temporal awareness is wholly the product of experiential memory. The various proposals we have considered thus far are all versions of the weaker claim. Why? Because of the example we have been working with: the sequence of tones C-D-E. Each of these individual tones has (it was stipulated) a short but noticeable duration, i.e. a duration which is directly experienced. Since the weak claim recognizes that some experiences possess genuine temporal depth, it falls short of full anti-realism; it amounts only to partial anti-realism. The strong memory theory is fully anti-realist. If phenomenal temporality is wholly the product of memory, there can be no direct experience (or memory) of duration or change whatsoever. This means that our experience of even a single brief tone must be explained in terms of involuntary short-term memories. But memories of what? The answer must be: a succession of strictly durationless experiences. My experience of the tone C consists of a large (infinite?) number of momentary durationless experiences, each (except the first) being accompanied by a large number of nested involuntary short-term memories of other momentary experiences. And what holds of the single tone C also holds of the experience of C-being-followed-by-D. This proposal suffers from a very severe plausibility problem. On the one hand, it is hard to believe that we are not immediately aware of some duration in experience. Is a strictly durationless auditory experience even possible? On the other hand, we are being asked to believe that our experience of duration depends on vast numbers of nested momentary memory-images (for it should not be forgotten that the short-term memories must themselves be durationless). This too is very hard to believe. On hearing the succession of tones C-D-E, are we aware of vast numbers of constantly changing momentary memories? I think not. (127)

[In other cases Dainton does not seem to regard what is difficult to imagine or conceive to be necessarily incorrect. We might here want more argumentation to show why these positions cannot be so or probably are not so.]

5.5 Pulses and binding

We now look at the weak claim, which again says that “we are directly aware of the duration of individual tones (such as C, D and E), and memory only comes into the picture to explain our (apparent) experience of one tone being succeeded by another.” But because we can be directly aware of durations, that means our consciousness might occur not in instants but in pulses [I suppose in thicker presents].

If we can be directly aware of the duration of single tones (of the right duration), we can presumably be similarly directly aware of other forms of experience: short stretches of thought, visual experience, and so forth. We are thus led to the view that consciousness itself occurs in short pulses, each of which is experienced as a whole, from which it is but a short step to the view that a stream of consciousness consists of a succession of such pulses, each a short-lived total experience. (128)

 

We see such a view in Whitehead’s ‘actual entities’ or ‘actual occasion’ which are drops of experience that make up the world, but they do not come into being part by part but rather all at once as wholes. Timothy Sprigge also has a similar idea of ‘momentary centres of experience’ that are not instantaneous but have a duration because they contain earlier and later phases. “Despite allowing qualitative changes within single momentary centres to be directly experienced, Sprigge denies that the transition from one momentary centre to another can be experienced in the same way: all experience is confined within discrete experiential units.” (128)

But in this pulse model, we need to know how we are aware of them happening in succession [assuming it seems that these models do not include co-consciousness]. It could be memory that links them, but we saw that this is problematic. Instead, the end of pulse 1 [C-D] and the beginning of pulse 2 [E-F] might be qualitatively similar not just in auditory respects but also in others [other elements of the experience might remain the same, for example sensations on our body from the chair we sit in through both pulses]. Even so, Dainton does not think this can account for our uninterrupted flow of consciousness. (128)

In pulse theory, we are aware of some transitions and not others, so between C and D, and between E and F, and yet D to E was supposedly of the same nature. But pulse theory would distinguish them, which makes it hard to explain the whole continuity of C-D-E-F. (129)

More generally, we are constantly aware of phenomenal contents undergoing passage, there is a constant flow and continual renewal of content. This experienced passage is both continuous and homogeneous: when we witness a continuous change, to the extent that we are directly aware of the change occurring, we are aware of every part and portion of it in the same way. If experience were packaged into discrete units, this would not be the case. Move your hand slowly but smoothly across your field of vision. At each moment you see your hand at a different position; you also see your hand continuously moving. Not only is the movement continuous, but your experience of the movement is continuous: you are directly aware of every perceivable change in your hand’s location in the same way. Or imagine hearing a succession of fast clicks. You have an immediate awareness of each individual click, in that you do not hear part of a click and remember or anticipate hearing the rest of it. The click as a whole is apprehended. But is it not the case that each click (except the first and last) is experienced with its immediate predecessor and successor? Is not each click co-conscious with its immediate neighbours? These fact suggests an important principle: that each brief phase of a stream of consciousness is phenomenally bound to the adjacent (co-streamal) phases. (129)

Dainton then has us consider a thought experiment. A copy of ourselves is in another room, but each of us on our own is watching a pendulum swing. It has a series of moments. But the moments are indistinguishable for both of us. That means according to the pulse theory, we could ever other moment insert the moment that our copy is having simultaneously [because pulse theory regards moment groupings as independent and secondly conjoined. But Dainton’s co-consciousness regards each moment already conjoined with its neighbors. So pulse theory can interchange the moments, which seems absurd, as it becomes unclear how one moment will pass in continuity to the next insofar as we are having an experience of the continuity of time and not just of the phenomenal contents of time. But Dainton’s theory would say that for continuity to happen you need just one continuously conjoined stream.]

Dainton then shows how this divided consciousness cannot explain a synchronic phenomenon. If we take half our visual field and the other half from out copy, that does not make a single experience. Dainton then wonders if it is not also the case for diachronic experiences. (131)

 

Dainton then considers a possible situation that could challenge his binding principle. If the world were to freeze and then resume, there would be a temporal gap between the moments, but presumably in our consciousness we were perceive continuity. (131)

He then distinguishes total cessations without binding and total cessations with binding. Those without binding would not be noticed because the connections never are experienced in the first place. But those with binding would notice something strange had happened, since the binding would have been compromised. (131)

The pulse theory fails in this respect, and this failure results in an inadequate description of the stream of consciousness. (131d)

5.6 A conflict of principles

Daintong will consider another reason for rejecting realism about phenomenal extension. “ No one denies that we experience change, so why would anyone be tempted to deny that consciousness extends some short way through time?” (132)

 

Phenomenologists of time often assume an awareness-content structure. (132)

William James thought that a succession of feelings is not itself a feeling of succession, and this feeling needs to be added and account for. We must know the past with the present in the present. (132)

In the chapter of James’ (1952) Principles devoted to the perception of time, there is a section entitled The feeling of past time is a present feeling’. James here discusses (and seems to endorse) a principle concerning the experience of time that has been regarded as self-evident by many philosophers and psychologists. [Dainton quoting James:]

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. 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…. what is past, and known as past, must be known with what is present, and during the ‘present’ spot of time.

James also quotes a passage from James Ward:

‘In a succession of events, say of sense-impressions A B C D E…, the presence of B means the absence of A and C, but the presentation of this succession involves the simultaneous presence in some mode or other of two or more of the presentations A B C D. In reality, past, present and future are differences in time, but in presentation all that corresponds to these is in consciousness simultaneously.’ (132)

Dainton has us consider first we see a flash of red and then a flash of green: R and G. When we see G we are simultaneously aware of having seen R, but not vice versa, because G does not happen yet when we see R. So the feeling of past time is a feeling or awareness happening in the present.

Miller (1984:109) calls this The Principle of Simultaneous Awareness, or PSA. This label is in one way apt, in another it is misleading. It is misleading in that R is not experienced as occurring simultaneously with G. The two flashes are not perceived to happen at the same time: they are perceived to happen in succession, first R then G. The label is apt in that as G occurs, one is simultaneously aware of R as having just occurred. (133)

Many who hold to PSA also subscribe to an awareness-content model and assume awareness is point-like and momentary. (133) But if we accept that experience is temporally extended, that means we are simultaneously aware of the first and the second half of the experience. But then those who follow PSA [and as well assume that experience is temporally extended] must claim that an act that apprehends temporally extended experiences is itself momentary. Also, we are aware of continuous successions. It is not enough for the past to be simultaneous with the present for us to be aware of its continuous flow. So following this line of reasoning, if we are aware of flow, then we are aware of some temporal extent in the flow. (134)

Now we wonder something. Assume PSA and the awareness content model. We see the sequence of flashes R-G and at G we experience something that provides us with an experience of their succession. What could this be? There seems to be realist and anti-realist possibilities.

The realist would say that somehow when we are aware of G, although our awareness is the momentary, it somehow has in its scope the extended duration across the appearings of R and G. But this goes counter to what Miller calls The Principle of Presentational Concurrence (PPC) which says that:

the duration of a content being presented is concurrent with the duration of the act of presenting it…the time interval occupied by a content which is before the mind is the very same time interval which is occupied by the act of presenting that very content. (1984:107)

Dainton thinks this seems plausible. (134)

If we take the anti-realist position, that means we “deny that the momentary awareness whose content is the succession R-G actually extends into the past.” (134) In this case, to be aware of the succession R-G means that we instantaneously apprehend both G and a representation of R and not R itself. 

If consciousness does lack any genuine temporal depth, then an account along these lines seems unavoidable, assuming adherence to PSA. At any instant, we are apprehending a content which although instantaneous also represents or encodes a temporal spread of phenomena, such as a sequence of notes or a perceived movement. When these contents are apprehended, in a momentary act of experiencing, the result is an awareness of a temporal spread of phenomena. A stream of consciousness consists of a continuous succession of these momentary acts of awareness, each apprehending a representation of a temporal spread of phenomena. For obvious reasons, I will call accounts of this type representational anti-realisms. Are such accounts in conformity with PPC? In one sense they are: the awareness I have at any given instant is instantaneous and only apprehends an instantaneous part of my stream of consciousness. In another and more important sense they are not: at any typical instant my experience seems to be temporally extended, for example I am perceiving an extended tone, or an object moving some short distance within my field of vision, so the content of my awareness has at least an apparent temporal depth, a depth which is not possessed by my awareness itself. (135)

Dainton concludes this chapter:

The discussion of this section has suggested at least this much: PSA and the awareness-content model of consciousness are natural partners. For whether we accommodate PSA in a realist or anti-realist fashion, we are positing momentary acts of awareness with phenomenal contents that are non-momentary. If either type of account proves viable, proponents of the A-thesis would be back in business. (135)

 

 

Barry Dainton. Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.