Oliver Rashbrook

Two extremely detailed accounts of temporal experience can be found in the work of C. D. Broad. These accounts have been subject to considerable criticism. I argue that, when we look more carefully at Broad’s work, we find that much of this criticism fails to find its target. I show that the objection that ultimately proves troubling for Broad stems from his commitment to two principles: i) the Thin-PSA, and ii) the ‘Overlap’ claim. I use this result to demonstrate that we can learn two extremely important lessons from Broad’s work on temporal experience. The first lesson is that there is a structural problem facing any account that commits to these two principles. This is significant given that a number of recent accounts of temporal experience are so committed. The second lesson is that the problem facing these accounts stems only from commitment to the Thin-PSA and ‘Overlap’, rather than to commitment to a particular conception of how experiences are to be individuated. This, I argue, gives us reason to reject Tye’s recent claim that the problems facing accounts of temporal experience can be dissolved simply by making stipulations about how experiences are to be individuated.

This thesis concerns the unity of consciousness - in particular the phenomenal unity of consciousness. The idea that consciousness is 'phenomenally unified' is the idea that if we attempt to characterise 'what it is like' for a subject just by listing all of the distinct experiences had by that subject at and over time, we will leave something out. We will leave out the unity of those experiences - the way in which those experiences feature together in consciousness. We can distinguish between the unity of consciousness at a time, and the unity of consciousness over time. I do not attempt to provide an account of the unity of consciousness at a time here - I focus instead upon the issue of unity over time. Some theorists - Dainton and Tye for instance - have claimed that it is possible to provide a single account of unity that solves both problems of unity in the same way. My contribution to the issue of unity at a time shall be to argue that such a single account is not possible, due to important differences in the phenomenological constraints that apply to the two problems. I proceed by providing an account of what exactly the constraints on an account of unity over time are, and argue that accounts that commit to the 'Principle of Simultaneous Awareness' cannot meet these constraints. I then provide a diagnosis of what may have been driving acceptance of such a principle in the first place - I argue that driving such acceptance is a faiiure to identify the metaphysical category of 'Occurrent State'. I propose that we can provide a successful and substantive account of diachronic unity only if we commit to thinking of a subject's phenomenal states as Occurrent States.

There are two different varieties of question concerning the unity of consciousness: questions about unity at a time, and unity over time. A recent trend in the debate about unity has been to attempt to provide a ‘generalized’ account that purports to solve both problems in the same way. This attempt can be seen in the accounts of Barry Dainton and Michael Tye. In this paper, I argue that there are crucial differences between unity over time and unity at a time that make it impossible to provide a generalized account of unity. The source of these crucial differences is the phenomenon of the ‘continuity of consciousness’. I argue that accounts of unity over time have to provide an account of this continuity, and that there is no phenomenon analogous to continuity in the case of unity at a time. Attention to the continuity of consciousness reveals crucial structural differences between the two varieties of unity. These structural differences make it impossible to provide a generalized account of unity. I show that the problems faced by Dainton’s and Tye’s accounts in the light of the structural differences make their accounts of unity appear far less appealing than they might initially have looked. I conclude by noting that, in the light of the important differences between the two varieties of unity, it is a mistake to attempt to model accounts of unity over time on accounts of unity at a time

: In this paper I discuss two puzzles that concern the sense in which consciousness can be described as ‘continuous’. The first puzzle arises out of recent work by Dainton and Tye, both of whom appear to oscillate between ascribing the property of ‘continuity’ to the stream of experience, and ascribing it to the objects of experience. The second puzzle concerns the notion that the stream of consciousness could be in some sense unreal or illusory—a puzzle stemming from the thought that some of the brain processes underlying consciousness do not exhibit continuity. I argue that these problems can be solved by distinguishing between three possible bearers of the property of ‘continuity’—(1) the State of Consciousness, (2) the Stream of Experience, and (3) what is represented by experience—and two different senses of ‘continuity’—‘strict’ and ‘extreme’ continuity. I conclude by providing a positive account of the continuity of consciousness, according to which the State of Consciousness exhibits ‘strict’ continuity, and the Stream of Experience exhibits ‘extreme’ continuity

A familiar slogan in the literature on temporal experience is that ‘a succession of appearances, in and of itself, does not amount to an experience of succession’. I show that we can distinguish between a strong and a weak sense of this slogan. I diagnose the strong interpretation of the slogan as requiring the support of an assumption I call the ‘Seems→Seemed’ claim. I then show that commitment to this assumption comes at a price: if we accept it, we either have to reject the extremely plausible idea that experience is as it seems, or we are forced to provide an account of temporal experience that isn’t compatible with the phenomenology. I conclude by noting that the only plausible interpretation of the slogan is the weak interpretation, and outline a positive account of temporal experience, according to which an appearance of succession requires a succession of appearances