Barry Francis Dainton

That our ordinary everyday experience exhibits both unity and continuity is uncontroversial, and on the face of it utterly unmysterious. At any moment we have some conscious awareness of both the world about us, as revealed through our perceptual experiences, and our own inner states – our bodily sensations, thoughts, mental images and so on. Since once wakened we tend to stay awake for several hours, tracing out continuous routes through whatever environment we happen to find ourselves in, it is hardly surprising that our experience itself is continuous rather than discontinuous

The claim that we are subjects of experience, i.e. beings whose nature is intimately bound up with consciousness, is in many ways a plausible one. There is, however, more than one way of developing a metaphysical account of the nature of subjects. The view that subjects are essentially conscious has the unfortunate consequence that subjects cannot survive periods of unconsciousness. A more appealing alternative is to hold that subjects are beings with the capacity to be conscious, a capacity which need not always be exercised. But this view can itself be developed in more than one way. The option I defend here is that subjects are nothing more than capacities for consciousness, a view I call the. Although the C-theory supplies us with a potentially appealing account of the nature of subjects, there are challenges to be overcome. Olson has argued that identifying ourselves with what are, in effect, parts of human organisms leads to a variety of intolerable problems. I suggest that these problems are by no means insuperable. Bayne and Johnston have argued that identifying subjects with experience-producing systems is confronted with a different difficulty. What if these systems can produce multiple streams of consciousness at once. Whatever else they may be, aren't subjects the kind of thing that can have just one stream of consciousness at a time? In response I argue that this is true in one sense, but not in another. Once this is appreciated, the notion that a subject could have several streams of consciousness at once no longer seems absurd, or impossible

In ordinary conscious experience, consciousness of time seems to be ubiquitous. For example, we seem to be directly aware of change, movement, and succession across brief temporal intervals. How is this possible? Many different models of temporal consciousness have been proposed. Some philosophers have argued that consciousness is confined to a momentary interval and that we are not in fact directly aware of change. Others have argued that although consciousness itself is momentary, we are nevertheless conscious of change. Still others have argued that consciousness is itself extended in time. In this entry, the motivations and merits of these and other positions will be expounded and assessed.

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;We are mental beings whose identity is absolute, intrinsic and real. This conception of the self, which, it is argued, corresponds to our deeper beliefs about, and attitudes towards, ourselves and others, is a consequence of taking the experienced unity and continuity of consciousness as the key to self-identity. Some of the difficulties often taken as fatal to this "subjectivist" view of the self, considerations concerning private languages and the individuation of conscious beings from within pure consciousness, are disposed of in Chapter 2. The next two chapters focus on the stream of consciousness. It is shown that the unity and copersonality of intra-streamal experiences both at and over time is constituted by and experience of unity. Building on this result, in Chapter 5 an account of the self as a mental entity whose identity consists in the persistence of potential streamal experience is developed. The notion of the Pure Ego is then examined; the reasons for positing such an entity are found wanting; but the neoHumean account of the self which has by this point emerged is compatible with the intuition that the self is a simple and basic entity, distinct from its actual mental states. In Chapter 7 the alleged possibility of selves undergoing fission and fusion is investigated. This is found to be a genuine possibility, but the claim that we should conclude from this that self-identity is not a relation which deeply matters is rejected, on the grounds that when a self divides, the products of fission are identical with one another. The apparent absurdity of this result is reduced by taking seriously the notion of topologically deviant subjective time dimensions; our identity matters, but our lives need not be linear

Can we directly experience change? Although some philosophers have denied it, the phenomenological evidence is unambiguous: we can, and do. But how is this possible? What structures or features of consciousness render such experience possible? A variety of very different answers to this question have been proposed, answers which have very different implications for the nature of consciousness itself. In this brief survey no attempt is made to engage with the often complex (and sometimes obscure) literature on this topic. Instead, a largely schematic examination of the main options is conducted, with a view to determining the most promising avenues for further investigation.

For those with an interest in the most fundamental components of reality, reflecting on the simplest of things can yield a rich harvest. Consider two buttons, of exactly the same shade of red, one round and made of plastic, the other square and made of wood. Each button is clearly a distinct object in its own right: each is composed of a different portion of matter, each has its own spatial location. But are the buttons completely distinct? It might seem so, but a little reflection can suggest otherwise. Both buttons are the same colour, they are each red. The buttons do not possess merely similar colours, they possess literally identical colours: one and the same colour, a particular shade of red, is found in both objects. This same colour can be also be found in many other objects. Colour, it seems, is not tied down to any specific time or place, in the way ordinary objects are. The same (literally identical) colour can exist at many times and places. And what holds for colour also holds for other shareable characteristics, such as shapes and sizes, and sounds. We are thus led to the (now familiar) distinction between particulars (spatially located objects) and universals (repeatable, multiply-located properties). Plato was no stranger to this line of reasoning, but he found himself driven to take several further steps. He observed that in ordinary life we never encounter a truly perfect circle (or square, or triangle, or straight line), but that we nonetheless have the concept of such a circle. Relying on the (no means absurd) assumption that meaningful terms must have referents – in order to be meaningful at all – he was led to the conclusion that the perfect circle must exist in a non-physical plane of reality, a dimension where perfection is possible. He called this changeless, timeless, realm the world of ‘Forms’. He further reasoned that since ‘circle’ is a universal, all other universals (such as redness) must inhabit this realm also. Resemblances among the familiar objects in the physical world are to be explained in terms of Forms ‘participating’, more or less adequately, in these objects..