Daniele Cassaghi

Retentionalism and extensionalism are theories of temporal consciousness. As such, they aim to explain how subjects are aware of temporally extended phenomena as succession. Direct realism and representationalism are theories of general perception: they aim to explain what our perceptual experience consists of and what kinds of objects we perceive. The received view marries retentionalism with representationalism and extensionalism with direct realism. Although some forms of extensionalism departing from direct realism have been advanced, nobody has proposed the fourth combination: retentional direct realism. This paper aims to fill the gap and provide a way to understand how retentionalism and direct realism can be coherently combined. This new theory takes the best of the two worlds, putting together the, arguably, best theory of temporal consciousness with the, arguably, best theory of general perception. And it has an additional advantage: it easily solves one of the main problems for retentionalism in the literature: the problem of repeated contents.

In the contemporary landscape about temporal experience, debates concerning the “hard question” of the experience of the flow—as opposed to debates concerning more qualitative aspects of temporality, such as change, movement, succession and duration—are gaining more and more attention. The overall dialectics can be thought of in terms of a debate between the realists (who take the phenomenology of the flow of time seriously, and propose various account of it) and deflationists (who take our description of temporal phenomenology as “flowy” to be spurious, and propose various explanation of this spuriousness). In this paper we look inside the realist side. We distinguish primitivist realism, according to which the feeling of time flowing is an irreducible sui generis phenomenology, and various forms of reductionist realism, according to which the experience of the flow is ultimately explainable in terms of a more basic phenomenology. We present reasons to be sceptical against the various reductionist proposals. The conclusion is thus disjunctive: either primitivism or deflationism is the correct account of the purported experience of the flow of time.

The idea that the present moment is in some sense experientially privileged has been used in various _arguments from presentness_ in favour of the existence of an objective present. Roughly speaking, in the literature we find two different approaches. Either by having an experience of something present we are aware of it as present (perceptual presentness), or by having an experience located in the present we are aware of our experience as present (locational presentness). While the various ways of understanding presentness can be used to formulate different arguments in favour of the existence of an objective present, none of them is ultimately tenable. Eventually, our conclusions will suggest that eliminativism is the best attitude towards presentness.

What if there is no hard problem with consciousness? Daniel Clement Dennett, King’s College London, The Philosophical Society, January, 13th, 2014. [Daniele Mario Cassaghi] How is it possible to distinguish a system which is conscious of its internal states from one which is not? In other terms, on which methods can we rely to discern a human being from a zombie with no “consciousness” at all? If I perceive red, I am, quo human being, conscious of the “redness” of the strawberry in front of me. How is it possible for a non-conscious system to be different from me? After all, it just perceives that strawberry without being internally aware of the “redness”. How is it possible, indeed, to differentiate two behaviourally indistinguishable systems on the basis of the presence of a certain conscious element within them? All these questions are what we call The Hard Problem with Consciousness: there is no a specific method to separate systems endowed with the so-called consciousness from those which work unconsciously. Why isn’t there more progress in philosophy? David Chalmers, Royal Institute of Philosophy, London, December, 13th, 2013. [Mattia Sorgon] There has not been large collective convergence on the big questions of philosophy. Concerning the most fundamental issues, such as the mind-body problem, the access to the external world, or the principles of morality, the debate is still very intense and controversial. Therefore, philosophy has not already reached neither a definitive result on its major topics and every theoretical perspective is still a viable position within the debate.