Perceiving Temporal Structure

by

Elliot Carter

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy University of Toronto

© Copyright by Elliot Carter 2020

ii

Perceiving Temporal Structure

Elliot Christopher Carter

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy

University of Toronto

2020

Abstract

Perceptual experience seems to present us with not only objects and their ‘static’

properties such as shapes, colours, and positions but also with events and their temporal

structure: that is, their temporal relationships such as simultaneity and temporal order.

This dissertation aims to defend the claim that we perceptually experience temporal

structure from recently revived challenges, and to show how a theory of temporal

perception bears on central issues in the philosophy of mind.

Experience manifestly possesses its own temporal structure. If we have perceptual

experiences of the temporal structure of external events, it seems natural to ask whether

there is a deep explanatory connection between the temporal features of the experiences

themselves and the temporal features that they are experiences of. Accordingly, much of

the philosophical debate about temporal perception focuses on the matching thesis: the

claim that the temporal structure of perceptual experience always matches the temporal

structure that one experiences events as having. Debate between critics and proponents

of the thesis can sometimes appear to be stuck in a clash between experimental results

and strongly held introspective intuitions about experience. I do not directly argue

iii

against the matching thesis, but I show how we can improve upon existing

experimentally-based arguments against it. I also show how its critics can explain (rather

than simply disregard or deny) the intuitions that allegedly support it. Trying to explain

these intuitions from the critic’s perspective suggests new ideas about temporal

perception that are not only coherent but independently plausible. I develop these ideas

and show how they can deepen our understanding of how temporal perception fits with

other issues central to the philosophy of mind: our introspective awareness of our

experiences, the connection between perception and the temporal present, and

perception’s role in guiding action.

iv

Acknowledgements

In writing this I benefited greatly from the help and support of many people. My largest

debt is to my supervisor, Mohan Matthen. He was a tireless reader and commenter,

unfailingly generous with his time and effort. His advice led to innumerable

improvements, big and small. I owe a debt of gratitude to the rest of my committee as

well. Bill Seager’s sharp questions frequently helped me to see clearly what I had

misunderstood or overlooked, and his enthusiasm and inquisitiveness helped me to

focus on what was interesting and important. And Diana Raffman was a careful reader,

whose suggestions were invaluable; I can only hope to imitate her clarity, precision and

style as a writer. Imogen Dickie also served as a member of my committee before moving

to the University of St Andrews. She helped me greatly in refining my questions and

arguments, and demonstrated a standard of intellectual rigour that gave me something

to aspire to.

I was lucky enough to spend a semester at the University of Warwick as a visiting

graduate student under the supervision of Matthew Soteriou. His incisive comments

helped to focus and shape the project. During this time, I also met with Christoph Hoerl

and Ian Phillips, both of whom generously read my work and gave insightful feedback.

I am grateful to my internal examiner, Michael Miller, and my external examiner, Barry

Dainton. Although my work falls outside his usual focus, Michael’s questions and

comments raised important methodological issues that got right to the heart of the

project. And Barry’s philosophical skill and expertise on my topic shone through in his

v

questions and comments. He obviously read the dissertation with a level of care that went

above and beyond, and his feedback was invaluable.

Much of my philosophical inspiration comes from the community of graduate students

(current and former) at the University of Toronto. Thanks (in no particular order) to Dave

Suarez, John Bunke, Julia Jael Smith, Mark Fortney, Sean Michael Smith, Jessica Wright,

Damian Melamedoff, James Davies, Luke Roelofs, Lisa Doerksen, Manish Oza, Melissa

Rees, Clinton Debogorski, Rory Harder, Catherine Rioux, Matthieu Remacle, Eric

Mathison, Michaela Manson, Daniel Munro and Zachary Weinstein. Special thanks are

due to Aaron Henry, Mason Westfall, and Dominic Alford-Duguid, conversations with

whom were especially helpful in shaping and reshaping my project. Thanks also to Evan

Westra and Michael Barkasi, who were post-docs at U of T during the past year and who

gave me extremely helpful feedback. I would also like to thank a few faculty members

who, while not officially involved in my project, helped me in some capacity along the

way: Gurpreet Rattan, Benj Hellie, Jessica Wilson, Marleen Rozemond, Jennifer Nagel,

and Mark Kingwell. Thanks also to Margaret Opaku-Pare and Mary Frances Ellison,

without whose administrative assistance I doubt this dissertation would exist.

I presented portions of this work to audiences at the CPA in 2016 and 2018 and the APA

Central in 2018. Thanks to audiences on those occasions, and thanks especially to my

commentator at the APA Central, Joseph Neisser. Thanks to Daniel Dennett and the

audience at the Workshop on Daniel Dennett at the University of Antwerp in 2018,

organized by Bence Nanay. Special thanks to Gerardo Viera, who provided extremely

valuable comments and feedback on (what is now) Chapter 2, some of which prompted

major, much-needed revisions.

vi

Outside of philosophy, I am grateful to Laurence Harris, who met with me to discuss my

interest in his psychological research on perceiving simultaneity, and his collaborator

Vanessa Harrar, who generously corresponded with me about her work.

I was a fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute during the 2016-2017 academic year,

and I benefited greatly from the experience. I was also a member of a virtual dissertation

group organized by Joshua Smart. Thanks to Géraldine Carranante for helpful written

comments.

A wholehearted and earnest thanks to my parents, Patrice and Kevin, and my brother,

Lewis, who have been an unwavering source of support. Thanks also to my wife’s

parents, Fran and Konrad, and her sister, Kyra. Their enthusiasm and support have been

inspirational. And finally, I am eternally grateful to my wife, Alexandra. I could not (and

would not) have done this without her encouragement.

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of

Canada.

vii

Table of Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1

Chapter 1: Do We Perceive Temporal Structure? .................................................................... 7

1.1 What Does It Mean to Say That We Perceptually Experience Temporal Structure? ......... 9

1.2 The Static Snapshot Theory ........................................................................................................ 16

1.3 The Dynamic Snapshot Theory: Motion and Change in Position ...................................... 22

1.4 The Dynamic Snapshot Theory: Other Temporal Features .................................................. 28

Chapter 2: How to Determine the Temporal Structure of Experience ................................ 38

2.1 Existing Arguments Against the Matching Thesis ................................................................ 42

2.2 Postdiction and the Matching Thesis: Pre or Post-Experiential Influence? ...................... 47

2.3 Simultaneity Perception and the Matching Thesis ................................................................ 55

2.4 The Finish Line Model and the Labeling Model: Testable Differences ............................ 64

2.5 Concluding Remarks .................................................................................................................... 73

Chapter 3: Temporal Transparency and the Matching Thesis ............................................ 75

3.1 Transparency and Time ............................................................................................................... 79

3.2 Temporally Opaque Mental Events .......................................................................................... 88

3.3 Temporal Opacity and the Apparent Temporal Structure of Experience .......................... 93

3.4 Concluding Remarks .................................................................................................................. 100

Chapter 4: Perception, Action, and the Present ................................................................... 102

4.1 Phenomenal Temporal Presence .............................................................................................. 103

4.2 The Role of Perceptual Experience in Guiding Action ....................................................... 108

4.3 The Connection Between Action Guidance and the Present ............................................. 117

4.4 Objections to the Action Guidance Theory ........................................................................... 124

4.5 Concluding Remarks .................................................................................................................. 129

viii

Chapter 5: The Puzzle of the Specious Present ..................................................................... 131

5.1 Extant Responses to the Puzzle ................................................................................................ 134

5.2 Is Temporal Presence a Property That We Perceptually Experience? .............................. 138

5.3 The Action Guidance Theory and the Specious Present .................................................... 149

5.4 Concluding Remarks .................................................................................................................. 158

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 161

1

Introduction

Consider the following cases of perceptual experience:

• The experience of watching a car begin to accelerate at an intersection.

• The experience of hearing a guitarist raise the pitch of note by bending a string.

• The experience of feeling someone run a finger across your back.

In each of these cases, you seem to be perceptually aware of how things are at certain

moments, but also of how things change over an interval. You see the colour, shape and

position of the car, but you seem also to see how the car’s position changes—you see it

move. You hear the timbre, loudness and pitch of the note, and you seem also to hear

how those qualities change as the string bends. You feel the pressure of the finger against

your back, but you seem also to feel the way the location of the finger’s contact with your

back changes.

These cases seem to demonstrate that we have perceptual experiences of

temporally extended events, and that part of what it is to perceptually experience an

event is to experience the relations of temporal order, or simultaneity, among the

temporal parts of the event. For example, you seem to see the car as moving from some

location to another, and this seems to involve experiencing the car as being at the first

location before the second. Likewise, you seem to hear the string as ringing at a lower

frequency before it rings at the higher frequency, and you seem to feel the finger as

touching your back at some location before another location. I will use the term temporal

structure for these aspects of experience.

2

This dissertation is about the perceptual experience of temporal structure. In

Chapter 1, I argue that examples like these indeed show what they seem to show: that we

genuinely perceive temporal structure. I criticize alternative proposals on which

perceptual experience consists in a series of ‘snapshots’ that do not portray temporal

relations. The remainder of the dissertation focuses on the question of how experiences

of temporal structure should be explained.

The key philosophical question about experiences of temporal structure is what

role the temporal characteristics of the experiences themselves ought to play in their

explanation. The possibility of asking this kind of question distinguishes temporal

experience from experiences other kinds. For example, we do not ask whether the shape

of an experience (if there is such a thing) helps to explain how it could be an experience

of the shape of objects, or how its colour might explain how it presents us with their

colours. But time seems different. Experience manifestly possesses its own temporal

structure, and many philosophers have wondered whether there is a deep explanatory

connection between the temporal structure of experience and the temporal properties

that we experience. Accordingly, much of the philosophical debate about temporal

experience has focused on the matching thesis: the claim that the temporal structure of

perceptual experience always matches the temporal structure that one experiences events

as having. According to the thesis, a perceptual experience of a flash preceding a bang

always consists of an earlier experience of the flash and a later experience of the bang.

Note that the alleged match is between the temporal properties of one’s experience and

the temporal properties that one experiences. It is not a match between the temporal

properties of experience and the temporal properties of the external events that cause

one’s experience (the thesis applies in cases of illusion and hallucination). According to

the thesis, experienced temporal order matches the temporal order among one’s

3

experiences. It is not possible to experience successiveness ‘all at once’; one’s experience

of a succession must itself be successive.

To many, the matching thesis seems highly intuitive. Phillips (2014a) calls it the

‘naïve view’ of temporal experience and considers it an article of common sense that we

should not give up without good reason. Even Lee, a critic of the thesis, admits that it is

favoured by our “prima facie intuitions” (2014a, 6).

However, many philosophers have thought that the intuitive appeal of the thesis

traces back to an error: a conflation between the properties of one’s experience itself and

the properties that one experiences. In a representative passage, Dennett and Kinsbourne

write:

In general, we must distinguish features of representings from the features of representeds…. [S]omeone can shout "softly, on tiptoe" at the top of his lungs, there are gigantic pictures of microscopic objects and oil paintings of artists making charcoal sketches. The top sentence of a written description of a standing man need not describe his head, nor the bottom sentence his feet. To suppose otherwise is confusedly to superimpose two different spaces: The representing space and the represented space. The same applies to time. (Dennett and Kinsbourne 1992, 188)

In non-temporal cases of perception, Dennett and Kinsbourne’s insistence on a

representing/represented distinction seems obviously correct. No one thinks that when

they visually experience a round, blue object, their experience itself is literally round and

blue. Nor does anyone think that when they have a tactile experience of a heavy object in

their palm, the experience is literally heavy.

Part of the reason these suggestions seem wrong is that we cannot really make

sense of them. Perhaps one’s experience really has such properties as colour, shape and

4

weight (e.g., if they are identical to temporal parts of brain regions that have such

properties), but these properties seem obviously irrelevant to explaining how one has

experiences of colour, shape and weight: the brain does not turn blue when you see

something blue, and even if it did, this would not help to explain the experience of

something as blue. But, as I have suggested, temporal properties are different: experience

is obviously a kind of process that unfolds over time (Phillips 2014a). Philosophers who

accept the matching thesis are not guilty of a naive conflation between the temporal

properties of experience and those of the experienced. They are putting forward a

sensible (and, I will argue, testable) hypothesis about the nature of their relationship, one

that is grounded in phenomenological intuitions that are worth taking seriously and

critically. It is a worthwhile philosophical question whether the experience/experienced

distinction applies the same way in the temporal case.

So: what would it take to determine whether it does? Answering this question is

the project of Chapter 2. My answer will be that the matching thesis can be tested using

the methods of psychophysics. I will argue that existing arguments against it based on

experimental results are flawed, but that the thesis does generate testable predictions

because it puts constraints on how the perceptual mechanisms underlying our awareness

of simultaneity and non-simultaneity must work. I will explain how these predictions can

be put to the test.

Do the phenomenological intuitions taken to support the matching thesis survive

philosophical scrutiny? This will be the question guiding Chapters 3 through 5. I will

argue that we can explain away the apparent phenomenological case for the matching

thesis without accusing its proponents of a crude vehicle/content confusion. In Chapter

3, I propose an indirect model of how we introspect temporal features of perceptual

experiences, where our awareness of the temporal properties of our experiences is

5

mediated by our awareness of the temporal properties of our stream of non-perceptual

mental events (like judgments and volitions). The indirect model is favoured by the

temporal transparency claim: the idea that when we introspectively attend to perceptual

experience, the only temporal features that seem available to attend to are those of the

events we experience (the temporal features of experience itself seem not to be directly

introspectively accessible). I will argue that the model can explain how the matching

thesis could appear to be correct even when it fails to be true over very brief intervals:

there is no guarantee that experience’s temporal structure really is as it (indirectly)

appears all the way down to the millisecond level.

Next, I turn to another potential source of phenomenological support for the

thesis: the connection between perceptual experience and the temporal present. I suggest

that part of the intuitive appeal of matching comes from the idea that perceptual

experience presents events as present, and that this idea can seem incoherent (or at least

implausible) if we reject the matching thesis. Roughly, the reason is that if the matching

thesis is false, then we can experience a succession of events ‘all at once,’ but by

hypothesis, we also experience each event in the succession as present. If we

simultaneously experience each event as present, then it is at least difficult to understand

how we could also experience them as successive. But I will argue that the appearance of

a problem here is the result of a mistaken (if intuitive) assumption about perceptual

experience’s connection with the temporal present. In Chapter 4, I argue that the felt

present-orientation of perceptual experience in fact reflects the characteristic role that

perceptual experience plays in guiding action, and that the temporal present is no part of

what we perceptually experience. Then, in Chapter 5, I argue that this account of the

connection between perceptual experience and the present is consistent with the falsity

6

of the matching thesis. We do not need to accept it to explain perception’s present-

orientation.

Philosophical arguments about temporal perception usually begin with either

phenomenological premises or premises about the results of psychological experiments.

Typically, the former kind of argument has been taken to support the matching thesis,

and the latter its denial. Although I do not directly argue that the thesis is false, an

overarching theme of this dissertation is that the phenomenological case for it, although

not based on a simple conflation between representing and represented, is much weaker

than has often been supposed. The intuitions taken to support the thesis can be explained

on alternative views. And the picture of temporal perception that emerges when one does

so is both coherent and independently plausible. From the perspective of a critic, taking

seriously the phenomenological evidence for the matching thesis forces a re-examination

of the way that temporal perception fits with other phenomena central to our

understanding of the mind: our introspective awareness of our experiences, the

connection between perception and the present, and perception’s role in guiding action.

7

Chapter 1

Do We Perceive Temporal Structure?

Naive introspection suggests that we perceptually experience temporal

relationships among events such as simultaneity, successiveness, and temporal priority:

in other words, temporal structure. Evidently, we can perceptually experience things

moving as well as changing in qualities like size, colour, pitch, loudness, temperature,

pressure and so on. You see the car move; you hear the speaker’s voice quaver; you feel

the plane lift off. Among other things, these seem to be experiences of temporal structure.

When you perceptually experience something as moving from one location to another,

or as having one property and then another, it seems that you are perceptually aware of

a temporal relationship between two or more states of affairs.

Most of this dissertation will focus on philosophical theories that attempt to

explain how perceptual experience presents us with the temporal structure of events. But

this chapter will focus on defending the supposition that we experience temporal

structure in the first place. One might wonder why this claim needs any defense. Why

are examples like those given above not sufficient to conclude that temporal structure is

a perceivable aspect of the world? One would not normally begin a project on, say, the

perceptual experience of colour with a lengthy defense of the claim that we have colour

experiences, since it is so obvious that we do. What makes temporal structure different?

The answer is that in the recent and not-so-recent history of thinking about

temporal experience, a number of philosophers have denied that temporal relations can

be perceived. Instead, they have argued that what we perceptually experience is always

exhausted by how things are at a moment. Strictly speaking, on such views we never

8

perceive events as occurring simultaneously or in succession. Such theories are all

versions of what is called the snapshot theory of perceptual experience.1

The classic version of the snapshot theory—what I will call the static snapshot

theory—outright denies that we have experiences of motion or change. This version of the

theory seems to be impossible to square with ordinary intuitions about perceptual

experiences. Recently, however, philosophers have constructed a version of the theory

that respects those intuitions and aims to explain them, while holding onto the claim that

perceptual experience concerns only what goes on at a moment. This new version of the

theory—the dynamic snapshot theory—claims that although we perceptually experience

only momentary property instances, those properties can include ‘dynamic’ properties

such as moving at a time and rising in pitch at a time. On this view, you can visually

experience an object as moving, but not, strictly speaking, as being in one location and

then another. If this is right, we can perceptually experience motion, but can experience

changes in location only by comparing what we perceptually experience with what we

remember.

In this chapter, I aim to refute both forms of the snapshot theory. I begin by

contrasting the claim that we experience temporal structure with certain logically

stronger claims about how we experience it. Then, in Section 1.2, I introduce and criticize

the classic, static snapshot theory. In Section 1.3, I introduce the dynamic snapshot theory,

and assess its explanation of motion experience, which is motivated by certain temporal

illusions (motion aftereffects) that seem to show that one can experience motion without

1 The snapshot theory is sometimes called the cinematic model, since it suggests that our awareness of motion is caused by a succession of static ‘frames’ of experience (Dainton 2018).

9

experiencing anything as changing position. I argue that, contrary to what its proponents

claim, these illusions do not provide strong support for the theory’s explanation of

motion experience. Still, the theory is at least viable as an explanation of motion

experience. But if it is to succeed, it needs to explain every type of temporal perceptual

experience, not just that of motion. In Section 1.4, I argue that the theory cannot be

extended to other cases of temporal experience, and so the snapshot theory—even in its

sophisticated, dynamic form—is false.

1.1 What Does It Mean to Say That We Perceptually Experience Temporal Structure?

My claim is that at we have perceptual experiences of temporal structure: that is,

of temporally extended events and temporal relationships among events. This claim

should be distinguished from stronger ones about how we perceive temporal structure.

Sometimes philosophers have rejected the claim that we perceive temporal structure

because they have mistakenly attributed to it implications of some stronger view. Hence,

it will be important to get clear on the commitments of the claim.

First, I want to emphasize that the question of whether we perceptually experience

temporal structure does not presuppose any particular account of the phenomenal

character of perceptual experience. For example, suppose one takes a representationalist

view of perceptual experience, on which the phenomenal character of an experience (the

way it feels to its subject, which constitutes ‘what it’s like’ to have the experience) consists

10

in its representational content (a way that the experience represents the world as being).2

For the representationalist, the question arises as to the kinds that figure in the

representational content of experience, and hence constitute its phenomenal character

(Siegel 2010). The question this chapter addresses is an instance of this general question.

For the representationalist, we are asking whether temporally structured properties and

relations enter into the phenomenology-constituting content of experience.

We can make sense of the question on other views also. For the naive realist, the

phenomenal character of a (veridical) perceptual experience is constituted by a perceiver,

an external scene consisting of objects and their properties, and various aspects of the

perceiver’s perspective on the scene.3 But not every property of a perceived object will

figure into phenomenal character; objects have many properties that do not contribute to

how they appear in perception. So, on the naive realist view, the question I have posed

should be understood as the question of which properties of the scene can partly

constitute the phenomenal character of one’s experience. Can it include the temporal

arrangement of events?

On indirect theories, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is

constituted by narrow, non-representational characteristics of one’s mental state. For

example, on sense-data theories, phenomenal character is constituted by special, mind-

dependent objects and their properties, which are the objects of one’s direct perceptual

awareness. On mental paint theories (Block 1996), phenomenal character is constituted by

2 For examples of representationalist views, see Harman (1990), Tye (1995), Dretske (1995), Byrne (2006), Siegel (2011) and Chalmers (2011). 3 For examples of naive realist views, see Campbell (2002), Martin (2002), Brewer (2011), and Logue (2012).

11

the intrinsic properties of one’s experiences. Sometimes these are the properties in virtue

of which the experience represents the world (what Block calls ‘mental paint’), and

sometimes they are irrelevant to what the experience represents (what he calls ‘mental

latex’). For indirect theories, we should understand the question of this chapter as asking

whether there are intrinsic features of perceptual experiences (or of sense data), the direct

awareness of which amounts to an awareness of temporal structure.4

Another clarification is that the claim that we perceptually experience temporal

structure allows for a variety of views about the relationship between the temporal

structure of events as we experience them and the temporal structure of perceptual

experience itself.5 One’s stream of conscious perceptual experience is a kind of temporally

extended event with a temporal structure of its own; if we do have experiences of

temporal structure, we can ask how they are related to the temporal structure of our

experiences of them. According to extensionalist theories, one’s perceptual experience is

of a temporally structured event (partly) because the experience itself possesses that same

structure (so an experience of B following A always consists of an experience of A

followed by an experience of B) (Dainton 2000; Phillips 2009, 2014a). According to

retentionalist theories, we have experiences of temporal relationships between events, but

4 Presumably for indirect theorists, these intrinsic features would simply be the temporal structure of the experiences themselves. But we can leave it as an open question for now whether there could be some other feature of experience that plays this role. For example, Dainton (2018) critically discusses Broad’s (1938) view on which experience involves present ‘acts’ of awareness of the past, where the apparent temporal location of their objects depends on the degree of ‘presentedness’ of the act. Presentedness is supposed to be a phenomenal feature that the mental act possesses in the present. So, on this view, awareness of temporal structure seems to constitutively involve awareness of intrinsic, non-temporal features of our experiences. Dainton finds it mysterious how any such feature could explain the appearance of temporal structure, but we can at least register this as a possible view an indirect theorist might take. 5 How to decide between such views will be the topic of the Chapters 2 through 5.

12

such experiences are always momentary (Broad 1923; Brentano 1998; Husserl 1991).6 Such

a view requires that we distinguish the temporal properties of our experiences from the

temporal properties of experienced events. On such views, an experience of B following

A is a momentary occurrence which represents that B follows A. Retentionalism is one

form of what Lee (2014a) calls atomism, which is the view that the temporal structure of

perceptual experience does not match the temporal structure of the events we experience.

Retentionalist theories deny such a match, since they view temporal experiences as

momentary states of awareness, but this much is true also on theories according to which

experiences are temporally extended but do not match the temporal arrangements of the

events experienced. The arguments I will offer in this chapter support the fundamental

tenet common to extensionalism, retentionalism, and atomism—namely, commitment to

experiences of temporal structure.

The distinction among extensionalism, retentionalism and atomism is familiar in

the temporal experience literature, but there are other theoretical options concerning how

we perceive temporal structure that have received less attention. Here, I have in mind a

distinction between what I will call the temporal window view and the event specific view.

Roughly speaking, the distinction is between a view on which we experience intervals of

time as being ‘filled in’ with events from all sensory modalities and their temporal

relationships, and a view on which we experience events and their temporal relations in

a piecemeal way. On the temporal window view, if your overall perceptual awareness

includes two events, it necessarily speaks to how they are temporally related, whereas on

the event specific view, it might not.

6 See Dainton (2018) for a critical discussion of such views.

13

The temporal window view postulates a temporal field of awareness, analogous to

the visual field but extended in time rather than space.7 This view supposes that there is

some interval such that your overall perceptual experience always includes modality-

specific experiences of events that seem to occur within that interval, and you experience

all combinations of such events as standing in particular temporal relations to each other.

For example, you might have a constant experience of a 100-millisecond temporal field,

such that your current perceptual awareness would always include what you visually

experience over that interval, as well as what you feel, smell, taste, and so on. Moreover,

you would always experience these events as temporally related (just as, necessarily, you

seem to experience items within your visual field as spatially related). To illustrate, if

your current visual awareness was of a pair of successive flashes and your current

auditory awareness was of a pair of successive tones, then you would necessarily also

experience temporal relationships between the flashes and the tones—for example, your

experience must apparently settle whether the first flash occurs before, simultaneous

with, or after the first tone, and so on.

On the alternative, the event specific view, your current awareness might include

certain events that you do not experience as temporally related. In the example, you

might visually experience the flashes as successive and auditorily experience the tones as

successive without experiencing any temporal relationship between the flashes and the

tones. This is not to say that you experience those events as temporally unrelated—the

7 This idea might be part of what James (1890) has in mind in his well-known discussion of the specious present doctrine. I have given the idea a different name here to distinguish it from the stronger claim that everything one experiences within the temporal field is experienced as temporally present. I discuss the present-oriented nature of perceptual experience in Chapter 4, and its connection with the specious present doctrine in Chapter 5.

14

absence of awareness is not the awareness of absence. It could be that your experience is

simply silent on certain questions about how events are temporally related.

The temporal window view and the event specific view disagree over the kinds of

experiences that are possible because they disagree over how temporal perception works.

The temporal window view is committed to a model of perceptual processing on which

we are always aware of an interval of time and of the temporal relationships within it,

and perceiving the temporal relationships is a matter of the perceptual system locating

events within that interval. Imagine a timeline with a built-in scale relating distance on

the line to duration. Once you have plotted an event on the line, you do not need to do

anything else to represent how that event is temporally related to the other events you’ve

plotted. And you cannot plot an event on the line without thereby representing those

temporal relationships. The temporal window view suggests a model on which the

perceptual system always begins with a segment of such a line, and then plots perceived

events on it.

The event specific view denies that we perceive an event by locating it within an

already given interval, where the experience of temporal relationships to other perceived

events is an unavoidable consequence of determining its location. Rather, this view

supposes that the perceptual system must recognize temporal relationships in a

piecemeal way, somehow labeling events as simultaneous or as successive without

locating them within a temporal window. Over some interval of experience, the

perceptual system might represent events A, B, C and D. But, because it does not need to

locate them on a shared timeline, it might represent temporal relationships between A

15

and B and between C and D without representing the temporal relationships between,

e.g., A and C.8

The distinction is analogous to a distinction between maps and sentences as

representations of space. Maps, as Camp puts it, “automatically conjoin information

about the spatial location of all the objects and properties they represent” (2007, 161). Sets

of sentences do not automatically conjoin spatial information in this way, in the sense

that you can understand a set of sentences about some spatial facts without thereby

understanding the spatial information implied by their conjunction (you might, for

example, understand a set of directions without automatically understanding the spatial

relationship between the point of departure and the destination). According to the event

specific view but not the temporal window view, perceptual experiences of temporal

relationships do not automatically ‘conjoin’ in this way either. The point here is not that

perceptually experiencing temporal relationships is very much like being confronted

with a set of sentences. Rather, it is that temporal awareness in perception might be

limited, in a way analogous to the way that our understanding of the spatial information

encoded in a set of directions can be limited relative to that achieved by seeing the

directions represented on a map.

8 Arstila (2018) criticizes the idea that we perceive temporal structure on the grounds that such a view implies that “the end of an event lingers in our consciousness for as long as the specious present [i.e., the temporal window] lasts” (7). He says that this claim conflicts with experimental findings by Di Lollo (1980) that seem to show that how long an event persists in perceptual processing (for the purposes of certain psychophysical tasks) depends not on how recently the event ended, but rather on when it began. Whatever merits this argument has, it is not an argument against the general claim that we perceptually experience temporal structure; it is at best an argument against the temporal window view. The event specific view involves no commitment to the idea that all perceptually experienced events linger in our consciousness for a set amount of time. See Shardlow (2019) for other criticisms of Arstila’s argument.

16

Now we can better understand the commitments of the view that we perceptually

experience temporal structure. The view commits us to the idea that we have perceptual

experiences of events and of temporal relations between them, but it does not commit us

to any view of how experience itself is temporally structured, or to the idea of a temporal

‘field’ akin to the visual field, or to any view of how ‘rich’ or ‘sparse’ our experience of

such temporal relations is. We might, as philosophers sometimes assume, perceptually

experience a temporal window filled in with events and their temporal relationships, or

we might experience temporal relationships in a more piecemeal way. Perhaps the

perceptual system tracks temporal relationships within sense modalities but not always

between them, or within certain types of events (as we shall see in Section 1.4, phonemes

seem to be a plausible example), but not always between separately processed events. Or

perhaps experience is ‘rich’ with temporal information about events within the focus of

perceptual attention but not outside of it. The claim that we experience temporal structure

leaves open these theoretical options.

1.2 The Static Snapshot Theory

According to the static snapshot theory we perceive only momentary states of the

environment and we have no perceptual experiences of such phenomena as motion,

change, or persistence. Such a view is often attributed to Reid, who claimed that “if we

speak strictly and philosophically, no kind of succession can be an object either of the

senses or of consciousness” (1855, Essay III, Chapter V). Although this phenomenally

conservative position has few contemporary defenders, Chuard endorses the view that

17

“an experience can only represent what happens at a given time” (2011, 8-10). 9 He accepts

the apparent consequence that motion and change are never really perceived and that the

apprehension of such features is a product of post-perceptual operations involving

memory.

Why might someone believe the static snapshot theory? Reid evidently thought

that the impossibility of apprehending phenomena such as motion without the aid of

memory followed from the claim that the “operations” of the senses and perceptual

consciousness are “confined to the present point of time, and there can be no succession

in a point of time” (1855, Essay III, Chapter V). If we can perceptually experience a

temporal structured event, our experiences of its earlier and later parts must somehow

be unified—either at a time (as atomists and retentionalists believe) or across time (as

extensionalists believe). Snapshot theorists are either doubtful that such unity is possible

(as Reid seems to be) or doubtful that postulating it is necessary for explaining perceptual

phenomenology (as dynamic snapshot theorists believe, as we will see). I will have more

to say about these kinds of unity and whether they create explanatory difficulties for

theories of perception in later chapters.

The static snapshot theory posits two restrictions on what we can perceive. First,

we can perceive only how things are at a moment. But this restriction alone does not yield

the full snapshot theory, because ‘how things are at a moment’ might include the

instantiation of properties such as ‘is moving,’ or ‘is changing from red to green,’ or even

‘is flashing for the fifth time in a series of ten flashes.’ The static snapshot theorist denies

9 Chuard calls this view ‘perceptual atomism,’ but his view should not be confused with Lee’s atomism, which I discussed above.

18

that these properties can be perceptually experienced, and so they need to restrict the

class of perceivable properties to those that are ‘static,’ in some sense that excludes

motion, change, and so on.

However, precisely stating this second restriction is not straightforward, because

the notion of a ‘static’ property is unclear. If we want more than a merely extensional

definition (e.g., ‘those other than motion, change and so on’) we need to say something

about what members of this class of properties share that all ‘dynamic’ properties lack.

For example, one might suggest that the static properties are those that can be instantiated

only at an instant and whose instantiation can be wholly grounded in how things are

intrinsically at that instant, considered in isolation from any other time. On this version

of the snapshot theory, we perceptually experience only momentary states of affairs and

what we experience is limited to how things are in those moments intrinsically, as if they

existed in isolation, without a past or future. This seems to achieve the static snapshot

theorist’s desired result when it comes to motion and change: something can be moving

at an instant, but it moving at that instant depends on it changing positions over a larger

interval that includes the instant. So, the fact that something is moving at an instant is not

wholly grounded in what happens at the instant in isolation. But this definition produces

undesirable results in other cases. Consider pitch. A sound’s being of a certain pitch is at

least partly grounded in its frequency. Frequency is a temporal property; a sound’s having

a certain frequency depends on what happens over an interval. Therefore, it seems that

pitch is not a static property on this definition. But clearly, we can perceive pitch. So, the

19

static snapshot theorist should not define ‘static property’ in this way, to avoid having to

deny that we perceive pitch (and perhaps other properties).10

Thus, there is a significant question about how to make the static version of the

snapshot theory precise and coherent. This conceptual issue has gone largely unexplored,

perhaps because philosophers usually dismiss the theory on phenomenological grounds.

Dainton, for example, begins his overview article on temporal consciousness with the

claim that “we seem to be directly aware of change, movement, and succession across

brief temporal intervals,” and argues that the snapshot theory is not in a position to

explain this (2018). And Grush claims that “[n]othing is more obvious than that we can

experience, via perception” temporally extended events involving motion (2007a, 1). The

static snapshot theory is committed to the claim that all awareness of temporal properties

involves a comparison between perception and memory and that all such awareness is

the result of a post-perceptual inference (although this inference might be made

‘automatically’). But when you watch something move, your awareness of motion does

not obviously seem to involve comparing your current perceptual experience with your

memory of the immediate past.

Certain phenomenal contrast cases highlight the phenomenological inadequacy of

the static snapshot theory. Broad, in an example much discussed in the temporal

10 A possible response for the snapshot theorist might be to say that the only properties we can perceive are those that seem to be instantiated wholly in virtue of what goes on at a moment considered in isolation, rather than those that actually meet that condition. One might then say that pitch appears to (but does not in fact) meet the condition. For example, Chalmers (2006) claims that perceptual qualities are ‘Edenic’: they are simple, intrinsic qualities that exist only in the content of our perceptual experiences. Perceptual experiences are only ever partially veridical, since there are no Edenic qualities in the world. So the snapshot theorist might insist that although pitch (considered as a property of external events) is a temporal property, experienced pitch is a momentary Edenic quality that does not exist outside of the contents of our experiences.

20

experience literature, draws attention to the difference between seeing the second-hand

of the clock move and seeing that the hour-hand has moved (1923, 351). Clearly, these

experiences are phenomenologically different. Seeing that the hour hand has moved

seems to involve comparing the seen location of the hand with a remembered, previous

location, while seeing the second-hand move does not obviously involve any such

comparison—it seems that you simply see the motion. The static snapshot theory

conceives of all motion awareness as involving a comparison between the contents of

one’s current perceptual experience with those of memory. Therefore, it does not seem

capable of explaining the phenomenal contrast.

The static snapshot theorist has only three possible responses to such a case, and

none looks promising. First, they might dig in their heels and insist that there is no

phenomenal contrast to explain. But it seems impossible to deny that there is some

difference between the two experiences. Second, they could try to explain the difference

in terms of the static properties perceived. By analogy, we might say that we can see

motion in a static photograph when certain objects are blurred because of their motion

during exposure. One might suggest that in Broad’s example, we immediately infer

motion in one case but not the other on the basis of certain static cues, like blur. But it

seems doubtful that such cues exist in all cases of motion experience (indeed, it’s far from

obvious that the second hand appears blurred as it moves). The experience of inferring

motion from static cues like blur in a photograph is presumably phenomenologically

different from that of seeing things move.11 Moreover, it is plausible that nonhuman

11 A similar suggestion comes from Koch (cited in Dainton 2018): “Your subjective life could be a ceaseless sequence of such frames…. Within one such moment, the perception of brightness, colour, depth and motion would be constant. Think of motion painted onto each snapshot…” (2004, 264). Dainton rightly

21

animals have experiences of motion of the same kind as we do without having

sophisticated capacities for making inferences based on static cues (see, e.g., Bååth et al.

2014).

Finally, they could try to explain the difference in terms of non-perceptual

phenomenology. But it seems unlikely that a non-perceptual difference could explain the

phenomenal difference, since in both cases the subject judges that the hand is moving and

remembers its previous position. One might respond that the difference consists in the

occurrence of a mental representation of motion that is not perceptual but is not a

judgment either. Like perceptual experiences, this mental representation would occur

automatically, and independently of what the subject judges or believes about what’s

moving. Thus, the strategy would be to postulate a kind of representational state that

shares certain characteristics with perceptual experiences, but to insist that it is non-

perceptual. According to this view, one has perceptual experiences, understood as a

series of snapshots, and then has ‘higher-order,’ non-perceptual mental states that

represent the changes between snapshots.

The challenge for this response is to give a principled reason for calling this kind

of representation ‘non-perceptual.’ If these states are informationally encapsulated from

judgment and belief, they occur effortlessly and automatically, and they contribute to

explaining seemingly phenomenological differences between perceptual experiences,

then on what basis should we deny that they are perceptual? Absent an independent

argument, the claim seems ad hoc. If someone were to insist that such mental states are

non-perceptual, then it seems to me that we are having a merely terminological dispute.

criticizes this view as not taking seriously enough the phenomenological difference between viewing motion and viewing an image that suggests motion.

22

Another, more general problem with all three responses is that, as Dainton and

Grush emphasize in the quotations above, the phenomenological evidence for the claim

that we perceive motion does not seem to be significantly less compelling than that for

the claim that we perceive, e.g., shape or colour. Chuard writes that the snapshot theorist

should insist that we mistakenly think of our awareness of temporal properties as

perceptual rather than post-perceptual because of “cognitive, mnemonic, and

introspective limitations of various sorts” (2011, 11). The insistence that we can be

mistaken about perceptual phenomenology is reasonable. But it does not give us any

reason for doubting our phenomenological judgments about temporal properties in

particular.

1.3 The Dynamic Snapshot Theory: Motion and Change in Position

Earlier proponents and critics of the snapshot theory agree on a conditional claim:

if perception presents only momentary states of affairs, then the perception of motion

and change is impossible. In the recent literature on temporal experience, however,

several philosophers have denied this conditional. They argue that perception presents

us with momentary snapshots of the world, but these snapshots can portray motion and

change. The dynamic snapshot theory says that while, strictly speaking, we never perceive

an object as occupying different positions at different times, we can perceive it as moving

in such-and-such a direction at such-and-such a rate at a time. Prosser draws an analogy

between perceiving motion and representing speed with a speedometer:

… note that the position of a speedometer needle, at any time t, could itself be regarded as a representation of the speed of the car at t. It represents a rate of

23

motion of the car at an instant. There is such a quantity as the velocity of an object at a time, even if motion necessarily takes time. Consequently there is no obvious reason why an instantaneous velocity could not be represented, or experienced, as part of an instantaneous content. (2016, 121)

The claim here is not simply that a static mental image can represent how things unfold

over an interval of time, akin to how a motion-blurred photograph of an object can

represent the object’s trajectory over an interval. Nor is it the claim that motion can

actually occur at a moment, such that it can be true that an object moved between locations

instantaneously. Rather, the claim is that there is such a property as moving at a time, and

that it can be part of what is presented in a perceptual snapshot. Thus, if the dynamic

snapshot theory is a viable view, we do not need to suppose that we perceive temporal

structure to explain the perceptual experience of motion.

Dynamic snapshot theorists want to show that their theory can explain all there is

to explain about perception’s temporal phenomenology, and so we do not need to

suppose that we perceive temporal structure. The argument involves two stages. The first

stage is to show that the idea of dynamic snapshots can explain the phenomenology of

motion experience. To this end, they attempt to show that the experience of motion can

be dissociated from the experience of change in position. Since motion experience does

not require the experience of change in position, it does not require the experience of

temporal structure. The second stage is to argue that this strategy for explaining motion

experience can be extended, without loss of plausibility, to all other forms of temporal

experience.

I will argue that the first stage of the argument can be seen as a limited success,

insofar as dynamic snapshot theorists have presented empirical evidence that makes the

dissociation between experiences of motion and those of change in position (a

24

dissociation their view requires) seem plausible. However, this is not to say that the

evidence offered provides any positive support for their view—and I will argue that the

evidence does not help establish that their view offers a better explanation for motion

experience than does the view that we experience temporal structure.

Then, I will argue that the second stage is unsuccessful. There are genuine

perceptual experiences of temporal features that are not plausible candidates for the

dynamic snapshot theorist’s strategy for explaining motion experience. The idea of

dynamic snapshots is reasonable but inconclusive as a conjecture about motion

experience; it is hopeless as an account of other aspects of temporal experience.

First, let’s consider the case of motion. Prosser (2016, 2017) and Arstila (2018) both

argue that the experience of motion and the experience of changes of position are

dissociable. The main case for the dissociation comes from motion aftereffects, which occur

when the visual system adapts to a pattern moving in one direction and afterwards a

static pattern appears to move in an opposite direction. The most famous example is the

waterfall illusion, in which watching the downward motion of the waterfall makes the

surrounding rocks appear to be moving upwards.12 Prosser describes the experience as

one in which motion in a particular direction is experienced but “arguably—it does not

appear to the subject that there is any change in the locations of the objects in the

perceived scene” (2016, 123). Arstila claims that the rocks appear paradoxically “to move

and not move at the same time” (2018, 290).

12 A version of the illusion is discussed by Aristotle in On Dreams: “And also when persons turn away from looking at objects in motion, e.g. rivers, and especially those which flow very rapidly, they find that the visual stimulations still present themselves, for the things really at rest are then seen moving…” (Part 2).

25

Arstila interprets the illusion as demonstrating that the perceptual awareness of

motion involves a kind of encapsulated perceptual system dedicated to the detection of

what he calls ‘pure’ motion—that is, a system dedicated to producing representations of

motion without representations of differences in position. What this means is that the

information accessible to and employed by the system is not available to other perceptual

or cognitive systems. Thus, the detection system for pure motion might involve neurons

that are sensitive to such properties as an object first occupying location l1 and then l2, but

this information is not part of the output of the system, and it is not accessible to other

systems. The output of the system is the information that something is moving (with a

certain direction and velocity) but not the information that it occupied l1 and l2 at different

times. The system produces experiences of motion without concurrent experiences of

things being different at different times.13 Arstila’s view is that the outputs of the system

are conscious representations of instantaneous states of the environment that include

pure motion properties. The dynamic snapshot theory of motion experience is the view

that all perceptual experiences of motion are of pure motion, and never of change in

position.

Let us grant that motion aftereffects help to establish how the dynamic snapshot

theory might work as an explanation of motion phenomenology. But do they show that

the theory is the best explanation? I think not, for at least three reasons.14 First, it is one

thing to claim that there is a perceptual mechanism that produces representations of pure

13 Arstila is significantly influenced by Le Poidevin’s (2007) discussion of the waterfall illusion. Le Poidevin proposes that the waterfall illusion demonstrates that there are two mechanisms for motion detection involved in perception: one that detects pure motion and another, involving short-term memory, that detects differences in position. He claims that in the illusion, only the pure motion system is activated. 14 See Shardlow (2019) for related criticisms.

26

motion. It is quite another to claim that the mechanism produces representations of

instantaneous states of affairs involving pure motion. Even if motion is represented by a

separate system, it may be that pure motion, like change in position, can be represented

as being instantiated only over an interval. Evidence for a pure motion detection system

thus is not by itself evidence for the dynamic snapshot theory.

Second, it is unclear what the dissociation between motion and change in position

experiences demonstrated in motion aftereffects implies about ordinary, non-illusory

experiences of motion. Arstila and Prosser conclude that all perceptual experiences of

motion are experiences of pure motion, and never experiences of differences in position.15

But this does not follow from the evidence for a dissociation. It could be that Arstila’s

encapsulated pure motion system constitutes only one aspect of the ordinary perceptual

experience of motion, and that ordinary perceptual experiences of motion are also

experiences of changes in position. The proponent of perceived temporal structure can

argue that the experience of motion aftereffects is phenomenologically impoverished and

unlike ordinary experiences of motion in this respect. Indeed, all parties seem to agree

that there is something strange about your experience of the waterfall illusion. The

proponent of perceiving temporal structure can explain this in terms of one of the aspects

of ordinary perceptual experiences of motion being absent, while the dynamic snapshot

theorist cannot.16

15 An important caveat in Prosser’s case is that he ultimately does not think that the snapshot model (which he calls the ‘cinematic’ model) differs in content from the retentionalist, atomist or extensionalist models (2016, 154-158; 2017, 152-154). He is influenced by Dennett’s argument that there are no empirically detectable differences between such models, and that they differ only in hypothetical distributions of ‘qualia’. I criticize Dennett’s argument in Chapter 2. 16 This might help to explain why some commentators describe the experience of the waterfall illusion in such quasi-paradoxical terms as something visually appearing both as moving and as staying still. For

27

Third, the evidence for a complete dissociation between motion and change-in-

position perception is somewhat murky. Arstila’s idea of an encapsulated pure motion

detector follows the once dominant view in the psychological literature that motion

aftereffects show that object position and object motion are processed completely

independently. But more recent studies show a view this strong to be implausible. For

example, Nishida and Johnston (1999) found that motion aftereffects do involve a shift in

perceived position. In their experiment, subjects adapt to a rotating stimulus and then are

shown to misperceive a static pattern as rotating in the opposite direction (this is the

motion aftereffect). But they found that subjects also perceive the static pattern as

displaced in orientation in the same direction as the illusory rotation—so an illusion of

change in position does accompany the illusion of motion. Although these results show

that Arstila’s pure motion system is not strictly encapsulated from systems representing

position, they do not show that these systems are identical. Nishida and Johnston argue

that the motion and position systems must be distinct because the motion aftereffect and

the shift in position evolve differently over time: the aftereffect decreases as the position

shift increases, and the position shift can outlast the aftereffect (1999, 611). Therefore, the

dynamic snapshot theorists appear to be correct that the representation of motion is not

carried out by the same perceptual mechanisms as the representation of position.

However, it is one thing to claim that motion experiences do not reduce to experiences of

change in position and another thing to claim that one can perceptually experience

motion at an instant without experiencing anything as changing position. The latter claim

appears empirically unfounded.

example, Crane (1988) takes the waterfall illusion to involve contradictory representational content in visual experience (the experience represents something both as moving and as not moving).

28

1.4 The Dynamic Snapshot Theory: Other Temporal Features

So far, I have argued that the first stage in the dynamic snapshot theorist’s

argument for the possibility of their view is successful, although their view fares no better

with respect to the available evidence than the view that we experience temporal

structure. Here, I will argue that the second stage in their argument fails: the strategy they

employ to explain motion experience cannot be extended to the full range of temporal

features that we perceptually experience. I will do this by considering some examples.

But first I will make some comments about how to understand the strategy.

Let’s call this general strategy (abstracted from its application to the motion case)

the pure temporal properties strategy. In its general form, the strategy is to claim that for

every variety of perceptual temporal experience we enjoy (e.g., motion experience,

change experience) there is some pure temporal property P such that the temporal

phenomenal character of experiences of that kind can be exhaustively explained by

appealing to awareness of P. A pure temporal property is, approximately, a property that

can be experienced as being instantiated at an instant.17 Often we can specify these

properties by adding ‘at a time’ to the name of an ordinary temporal property (or, more

precisely, to the present progressive form of the corresponding verb). The pure temporal

property corresponding to motion is moving at a time; that corresponding to change is

changing at a time.

17 It should also be a property corresponding to a variety of temporal experience (motion experience, change experience, etc.), since, e.g., colours can be experienced as instantiated at an instant but are not pure temporal properties.

29

This approximate definition of ‘pure temporal properties’ is useful but not quite

sufficient. This is because (perhaps depending on one’s ontology of properties) there are

properties that can be represented as being instantiated at an instant but that are not

‘pure’ in a sense that would be helpful to the dynamic snapshot theorist. Consider the

property of occurring three seconds after a flash. A clap of thunder might have this property,

and can be represented as having it at a time in speech or thought. But one cannot

represent the thunder clap as having that property at a time without tacitly representing

how things were at other times (in particular, how things were three seconds earlier) and

tacitly representing a temporal relation between events. Thus, if such a property counted

as pure, then sometimes representing pure temporal properties would involve tacitly

representing temporal structure, and so the pure temporal properties strategy would not

support the dynamic snapshot theory. What this shows is that the pure temporal

properties involved in the dynamic snapshot theorist’s strategy are not merely those

properties that can be represented as instantiated at an instant, but rather those that can

be so represented without representing how things are at other times.

For any putative example of a kind of temporal perceptual experience, the

dynamic snapshot theorist has two options: employ the pure temporal properties

strategy to explain the experience, or deny that the experience in question really occurs

(or really is perceptual). In certain cases beyond motion experience, the extension of the

pure temporal properties strategy looks promising. For example, consider the experience

of a continuous change such as a light gradually changing from bright to dim. This appears

to be a temporal experience, as it seems to concern which properties the light has at

different times. But the dynamic snapshot theorist can maintain that the phenomenology

can be explained by postulating awareness of a pure temporal property—namely, that of

changing in brightness from brighter to dimmer at such and such a rate at a time (Prosser

30

2016, 123). At each moment you watch the light, you experience it as instantiating certain

static properties (like shape and current level of illumination), as well as a certain

dynamic property that is pure (the property of changing in brightness at a certain rate).

You do not, according to this explanation, ever experience the light as having changed

from one level of brightness to another, or as being at one level of brightness at t1 and

being at a different level at t2. Thus, this case seems to be well-suited to the pure temporal

properties strategy.

Other cases look less promising for the strategy. Consider the experience of

succession: of one event as following another. Here, the dynamic snapshot theorist cannot

employ the strategy, because no pure temporal property is available that would explain

the phenomenology. They cannot say that we perceptually experience the second event

as instantaneously instantiating the ‘pure’ temporal property of following the first,

because this would be to admit that we perceive temporal structure. Here, they are better

off trying to deny that experiences of temporal order are genuinely perceptual and

maintain that awareness of succession is always a post-perceptual achievement involving

memory.18

The strongest evidence against the dynamic snapshot theory would be a case

where neither of these responses is plausible. One kind of case that fits this description is

a certain kind of experience of the persistence of an object across time. To illustrate the

kind of experience I have in mind, consider the motion-bounce illusion (Sekuler et al. 1997).

The illusion involves an ambiguous percept in which two dots approach each other and

18 Arstila suggests employing the pure temporal properties strategy across a range of cases, including the perception of change, causation and succession (2018, 9-10). For the reasons I have discussed, I do not think that the strategy is available in the case of succession.

31

can either be seen as crossing paths or as bouncing off each other and changing

trajectories. Subjects might interpret the visual percept on its own as either ‘bouncing’ or

‘passing,’ but the ‘bounce’ interpretation can be induced by inserting an audio cue at the

moment the dots meet. There is an obvious phenomenological difference between the

experiences associated with the ‘bounce’ interpretation and the ‘pass’ interpretation. The

difference seems to concern which dot is which, before and after they intersect, and

whether or not the dots change trajectories. But it is unclear what the dynamic snapshot

theorist could say about this phenomenological difference, because which dot is which

doesn’t seem to be a matter of how things are at any time considered in isolation. At each

moment you are watching the display, you will see two dots as having the same static

properties (like location) and the same pure temporal properties (like instantaneous rates

and directions of motion), regardless of whether you see them as bouncing or passing.

Rather, the difference between interpretations seems to concern what’s going on across

time: whether the dots appear to change direction at the moment they intersect, and

whether the dot that was in the top-left quadrant of the display is now in the bottom-left,

or in the bottom-right.

The dynamic snapshot theorist might reply that the characterization of the

difference as a temporal difference is incorrect and that instead we just experience each

dot at each time as instantiating an identity-involving property. For example, we first

experience the dot in the top-left quadrant as having the property of being dot A. Then, in

the bounce interpretation, we experience the dot in the bottom-left quadrant as having

the property of being dot A, and in the pass interpretation, we experience the bottom-

right dot as having that property. According to this reply, the property of being dot A is

not a temporal property. Thus, there is a difference in the experience associated with each

condition that is not a difference in how things are experienced as persisting over time.

32

So, we can point to a phenomenological difference between interpretations that does not

involve the experience of temporal structure. But even if the identity of each dot is part

of your perceptual experience before and after the dots intersect, this response

nonetheless turns the difference between one’s awareness of the dots as bouncing or as

passing into a post-perceptual difference. Your earlier awareness of the top-left dot as

being dot A and later awareness of the bottom left-dot as being dot A does not amount to

an awareness of the dot bouncing rather than passing unless at the later time you

remember what you saw at the earlier time and draw the appropriate inference. The

response cannot uphold the plausible claim that one perceptually experiences rather than

infers the dot’s change in trajectory.

At this point, the dynamic snapshot theorist might dig in their heels and insist that

we do not perceive temporal structure in the way I have described. Perhaps the

awareness involved in the bounce-pass illusion is a post-perceptual achievement: one is

inclined to judge that the dots cross paths (or bounce) but does not visually experience

them as doing so. Aside from (perhaps) awareness of identity-involving properties, the

visual experience is the same in each condition. A difficulty for this response, analogous

to that facing the static snapshot theorist’s attempt to explain the phenomenal contrast in

the second hand/hour hand case discussed above, is that the phenomenology does not

depend on one’s beliefs about the display. You can know that the percept is ambiguous—

indeed, you can know that the ‘dots’ neither bounce nor cross because they are merely

spots of light on a screen—and still experience them as doing one or the other. Again, one

might reply that the difference consists in the tokening of a mental representation of the

trajectory that is non-perceptual but also causally independent of what one believes or

judges. But as I have argued, the claim that such a representation is non-perceptual seems

to be a mere stipulation. We are owed a principled explanation for why it counts as such.

33

The dynamic snapshot theory faces greater difficulties when we expand our focus

beyond vision. Lee notes that auditory experience is especially hard to square with the

notion of perceptual snapshots, and not just because of the visual metaphor: duration and

order seem to be essential to characterizing the objects of auditory awareness (2014a, 2).

This is true not because of the temporal nature of auditory qualities like pitch (which I

discuss above) but because of the way that temporal structure matters to the identity and

unity of the sounds we perceive (Matthen 2010a; O’Callaghan 2011). Consider

O’Callaghan’s discussion of the nature of sounds, qua objects of perception:

Audible individuals perceptually appear to have duration—to take time. Moreover, they are perceptually individuated and identified in virtue of the patterns of change in their audible attributes through time. What distinguishes a police siren from a fire siren, or an utterance of ‘forest’ from an utterance of ‘troughs’, is a pattern of audible characteristics over time… An audible individual does not strike one perceptually as being wholly present at any given time, in the plausible sense that what it is present at that moment suffices for being that thing. (2011, 151-152).

O’Callaghan asserts that the objects of auditory awareness are essentially temporal

structured entities, and that they appear to be so in perceptual experience. This amounts

to a straightforward argument against the dynamic snapshot theory:

(1) An adequate characterization of auditory experience must allow that we

perceptually experience sounds. (2) To perceptually experience sounds, we must be auditorily aware of temporally

extended patterns of audible qualities. (3) Auditory awareness of such patterns is auditory awareness of temporal structure.

Therefore,

34

(4) An adequate characterization of auditory experience must allow that we have auditory awareness of temporal structure.

Such an argument might seem question-begging. The snapshot theorist could

reply that I have simply assumed a conception of sound, qua objects of auditory

experience, that is incompatible with their theory. They can claim that we do not perceive

sounds in that sense, and thus deny the second premise of the argument. What we

auditorily perceive, on this view, is momentary instantiations of audible qualities (pitch,

timbre, and loudness). When we talk about ‘the sound of the police siren’ or ‘the sound

of an utterance of “forest”,’ we are not talking about the kinds of sounds that we

auditorily experience, strictly speaking, just as when we speak of ‘the look of an

expensive suit jacket’ we are not talking about the kind of property that we visually

experience, strictly speaking.19 On this view, auditory perception is of momentary

audible qualities; awareness of ordinary ‘sounds,’ like that of the siren or the utterance,

is an achievement of memory.

The dynamic snapshot theorist can add to the story by claiming that we also

auditorily experience pure temporal properties, like rising or falling in loudness or pitch

at a time. The introduction of such properties might be well-motivated. One potential job

for such properties would be explaining the illusory experience of the Shepard tone

(Shepard 1964). The tone is actually made up of several tones at different pitches that rise

over an interval before repeating. But to the listener, the Shepard tone seems to involve a

19 This assumes that being an expensive suit jacket is not a property that figures into visual phenomenology. Siegel (2011) argues that visual experience might include ‘high-level’ properties, including (possibly) such artificial properties.

35

single tone that constantly rises without repeating. Like the waterfall illusion, this illusion

seems to demonstrate a dissociation between two kinds of temporal experiences: in this

case, one’s experience of a sound as rising or falling in pitch and one’s experience of it as

having different pitches at different times. The tone seems to rise forever, but in another

sense it (arguably) does not seem to be different in pitch from one repetition of the pattern

to the next. So, the dynamic snapshot theorist might argue that we evidently experience

pure temporal properties in audition as well as in vision. Perhaps awareness of such

properties will help to explain our sense that auditory awareness is of more than

momentary audible qualities.

However, this line of thought seems insufficient to explain auditory

phenomenology. Pure temporal properties might be sufficient to explain motion

experience, but auditory experience is a much more difficult case. Certain elements of

timbre—e.g., the buzz of a cicada, or the distinctive attack (the onset of the sound) that

distinguishes a guitar from a piano—seem to essentially involve not just pure temporal

properties like rising or falling in pitch, but certain distinctive temporal patterns of

audible qualities. The patterns occur very quickly; if our awareness of them is a post-

perceptual construction involving memories of momentary perceptual elements, the

memories of the momentary elements are somehow lost in the process and seem to escape

our notice. When we recognize an instance of the sound, we seem to be recognizing the

pattern. You know what a guitar sounds like, but you probably do not know what a

momentary snapshot of a guitar sounds like.

The snapshot theorist might accept that these consequences are counterintuitive

but insist that our introspective access to our perceptual phenomenology is restricted

(recall Chuard’s pessimism about perceptual introspection). But the snapshot theory of

audition is implausible for scientific reasons as well. If the snapshot theory of audition

36

were correct, we would expect auditory processing to be a bottom-up process of

determining the audible qualities of a signal at a time. We would not expect the auditory

system to be concerned with identifying temporally-extended sounds. In this sense, we

would expect auditory processing to be atomistic rather than holistic—auditory

processing would construct representations of the momentary temporal parts of a sound,

and then post-perceptual processes would identify the whole sound given the parts and

their arrangement. But these expectations are not borne out in experimental results.

Consider the fact that the experiences of certain phonemes, which we might think of as

relatively momentary, depend for their phenomenal character on the syllables that they

are experienced as being embedded in, rather than strictly on whatever is going on at the

corresponding stage of the acoustical signal (see Liberman et al. 1957, discussed in

Matthen 2010a, 68-69). The syllables /da/ and /du/ seem to share an initial sound in

common—the phoneme /d/. But when one analyzes the acoustical signal corresponding

to these syllables, one finds that there is no initial element that they share corresponding

to the /d/ sound. As Liberman et al. put it, “[i]f we cut progressively into the syllable

from the right-hand end, we hear /d/ plus a vowel, or a nonspeech sound; at no point

will we hear only /d/” (1967, 436).

This example seems to show that in some cases, the auditory system first

determines which temporally-extended unit is present in the signal, and this in turn

determines how things sound at each moment. But if the snapshot view were correct, we

would expect that the auditory system’s task would be to first generate representations

of audible qualities at a moment, and that this task would be prior to that of determining

how audible qualities change over time (which would be carried out by post-perceptual

mechanisms). To be clear, the violation of this expectation is not strictly inconsistent with

the snapshot theory. It could be that the output of the auditory system which becomes

37

part of conscious perceptual experience is always a momentary representation of audible

qualities, while the information that the system uses to produce such representations

involves extracting temporally extended patterns from the acoustical signal. My point is

not that such a view can be strictly ruled out on empirical grounds, but that it is

unmotivated. Phenomenologically speaking, we seem to hear temporally extended

sounds. Psychologically speaking, audition seems to involve the classification of

acoustical input into types of temporally extended patterns. The snapshot view has no

plausibility as an explanation for either of these facts, even if it could be rendered

consistent with them.20

Taking stock, we can see that the dynamic snapshot theorist begins with a

reasonable attempt to explain the phenomenology of motion in terms of awareness of

momentary phenomena, but then implausibly tries to extend this strategy to the rest of

temporal experience. It is true that experiences of motion and of change in position are to

some degree dissociable, but we cannot infer from this that motion experience is

momentary or that change-in-position experience is non-perceptual. Moreover, there are

other temporal features, like persistence and audible features, for which the dynamic

snapshot theorist’s pure temporal properties strategy cannot succeed. It is also

implausible to suggest that we do not perceive such features. This, to me, seems to be the

strongest case for believing that we have perceptual experiences of temporal structure.

Next, I will consider attempts to explain how such experiences are possible.

20 A visual example that illustrates the same point: the visual experience of depth (a static property) sometimes depends on information about how objects in the scene are moving (Ullman 1979, cited in Lee 2014a, 17).

38

Chapter 2

How to Determine the Temporal Structure of Experience

I have defended the view that we perceptually experience temporal structure. But

how does perceptual experience present the temporal structure of events? A natural first

thought is that at least part of the explanation is that our perceptual experiences are

themselves temporally structured events. Experience can be of time because it occurs over

time. The theory known as extensionalism takes up this line of thought (Dainton 2000,

2018; Phillips 2014a). According to extensionalists, we perceptually experience a set of

events as having a certain temporal structure because the experience of those events

possesses a matching structure. On this theory, if you have a perceptual experience as of

a flash following a bang, this is (in part) because you first have an experience of the bang

and then have an experience of the flash.

The theory is committed to what has been called the matching thesis (or sometimes

the mirroring thesis, or the inheritance principle), which claims that perceptually

experienced temporal structure always matches the temporal structure of one’s

experience.21 The matching thesis implies that it is a necessary (but not sufficient)

condition on a perceptual experience presenting a temporal arrangement that it possesses

that very same temporal arrangement.22 Note that the alleged match is between

21 The term ‘matching’ comes from Phillips (2014a), although he uses the term ‘inheritance’ elsewhere (2014b). The term ‘mirroring’ comes from Lee (2014a). 22 To see why the matching thesis is not supposed to give a sufficient condition for experiences of temporal structure, consider two experiences separated by a great deal of time (e.g., days). Perhaps the subject has forgotten the first experience when they have the second. These experiences will obviously not amount to an experience of temporal order (see Phillips 2014b, 133). Most philosophers writing about temporal

39

experience’s temporal structure and the temporal relations that we experience, rather

than between experience’s temporal structure and temporal relations between the

external events that cause our experiences (the thesis is supposed to apply in cases of

illusion and hallucination as well as veridical perception).23 Also, note that the matching

thesis is about temporal arrangement rather than temporal location. It says that one

experiences the bang as occurring first only if the bang experience in fact occurred first—

not that one experiences the bang as occurring at t only if the bang experience occurred

at t. Matching theorists may or may not endorse this further claim about a match in

temporal location, but the debate I will focus on is about a match in temporal structure

or arrangement.24

When we consider the rough temporal layout of our experiences ignoring the finer

details, the matching thesis seems hard to deny.25 I perceive the dog moving from the

north side of the crosswalk to the south side, and surely my visual experience of him on

the north side occurs before that of him on the south side. But the matching thesis is

controversial when applied to very brief intervals of experience. For example, some

experience assume that direct perceptual experiences of temporal structure are confined to very brief durations: e.g., less than a second. 23 In representationalist terms, the thesis concerns a match between temporal features of perceptual vehicles (the mental occurrences doing the representing) and those that appear in their perceptual content (what they represent). 24 I also will mostly ignore questions about the matching thesis as applied to temporal durations. So, I will not consider whether an experience of a flash as lasting for 50 milliseconds must itself last for 50 milliseconds, for example. For work addressing duration experience, see Stetson et al. (2007), Arstila (2012a), and Phillips (2013). 25 This claim assumes that we do have experiences of temporal structure over relatively long intervals (i.e., more than, say, half a second), which is controversial (see Footnote 22). What I mean is that if we experience temporal structure over relatively long intervals, it is hard to deny that the matching thesis is true at a relatively coarse level of grain. In Chapter 3 I take up the question of why the matching thesis seems obviously true (if it is applicable at all) at a certain level of temporal grain but does not seem obviously true at a finer level of grain.

40

philosophers have argued that the matching thesis is false below intervals of, e.g., 100-

300 milliseconds. These critics of the thesis claim that perceptual experience does present

us with temporal phenomena like motion and change, but they argue that experience’s

own temporal characteristics do not figure into an explanation of how we have such

experiences in the way the matching thesis claims. On this view, which Lee (2014a) calls

atomism, you can have a perceptual experience as of a bang preceding a flash without

having an earlier experience of the bang and a later experience of the flash. You could

experience the bang and the flash simultaneously without experiencing them as

simultaneous.26

On the other hand, defenders of the matching thesis often claim that it is supported

by how experience seems on introspection (e.g., Dainton 2000; Phillips 2010; Soteriou

2013). But, as I will argue in Chapter 3, introspection is a poor guide to fine temporal

details of one’s stream of conscious experience. As we shall see in that chapter,

introspective arguments are based on either an outright denial or a peculiar

understanding of the idea that perceptual experience is temporally transparent: that what

seems to be revealed by introspective attention to your perceptual experience is just the

temporal features of the events your experience is of, rather than the apparent temporal

features of your experience itself. In that chapter, I will argue there that the most plausible

understanding of temporal transparency undermines introspective arguments for the

matching thesis. But here I will focus on assessing arguments against the matching thesis.

26 The view that we can experience such things simultaneously should not be confused with the view that we can experience them instantaneously (see Lee 2014a). The view that they must be experienced at an instant or moment is sometimes called retentionalism and is merely one form of atomism (see Dainton 2018 for a critical overview of retentionalist views).

41

Existing arguments against the thesis are not usually based on introspection but

on experimental evidence from psychophysics or neuroscience (e.g., Grush 2007a; Watzl

2013; Lee 2014a). I will contend that such arguments are less than fully persuasive,

although they point in a promising direction. In particular, I will focus on arguments

based on postdiction: a class of illusions where a subject’s experience of an earlier stimulus

is affected by the presentation of a later stimulus. Attempts to draw anti-matching

conclusions from such effects are undercut by a distinction, introduced by Dennett (1991),

between two possible models that might explain them: a pre-experiential influence

model, and a post-experiential influence model. Only the post-experiential model

conflicts with the matching thesis; as long as the pre-experiential model cannot be ruled

out, the matching thesis is not threatened.

Infamously, Dennett argues that neither introspection nor experiment could ever

settle which of these two models is correct. If he is right, then arguments against the

matching thesis based on postdiction inevitably fail. However, I will argue that we can

get around this problem by adapting Dennett’s distinction between pre-experiential and

post-experiential models to a different context: the experience of simultaneity and non-

simultaneity. There, Dennett’s reasons for skepticism about determining which model is

correct do not apply, and I will suggest a way of testing the models based on existing

psychophysical methods. And I will argue that which model is correct has immediate

implications for the fate of the matching thesis. Therefore, the difficulty of assessing

postdictive arguments against the matching thesis can be overcome and we can put the

thesis to the test experimentally.

42

2.1 Existing Arguments Against the Matching Thesis

The question of how we perceptually experience temporal structure is

fundamentally a question about a kind of experiential unity. Awareness of the temporal

structure of an event involves awareness of an earlier part of the event and of a later part.

For example, if you have an auditory experience of a succession of notes, C and then D,

then that experience must involve an awareness of C and awareness of D. But to

experience their succession, it is insufficient to merely experience the C and then

experience the D (even if it is necessary, as the matching thesis says). As James famously

remarks in The Principles of Psychology, “a succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a

feeling of succession” (1890, 629). But what must be true of these two experiences for

them to be unified in the relevant sense?

One possible answer is that the experiences must occur simultaneously. Miller

(1984) dubs this idea the principle of simultaneous awareness (PSA): that to be aware of a

succession, one must be aware of it all at once. But to simply assert this answer is to beg

the question against extensionalism. Extensionalists claim that the kind of unity that

distinguishes an experience of succession from merely successive experiences is not

synchronic unity but diachronic unity (Dainton 2000). Their view is a kind of relationalist

theory of temporal phenomenology. An experience of succession cannot be instantiated

entirely at a moment, because it necessarily involves temporal relations between

experiences that occur at different times. The PSA implies that such diachronically

43

unified experiences are not possible, but it is hard to think of any generally acceptable,

non-question-begging reason why not.27

A different strategy is to argue that an experience of succession must involve

simultaneous awareness of the successive parts not as a necessary and a priori principle

about awareness, but rather as an empirical discovery. This is the strategy of Lee (2014a),

who argues that current cognitive science shows that an experience of succession must

be realized by a neural state that is trace integrated. Trace integration is a process by which

information stored in a temporal code (one where the temporal features of the vehicle, the

thing that represents, matches the temporal features of the content, what is represented)

is translated into a “simultaneous code,” where the temporal features are represented all

at once (Lee 2014a, 13-15). Assuming that the temporal features of an experience are the

same as those of the neural state that realizes it, a trace integrated experience is, by

definition, a counterexample to the matching thesis. And Lee argues that the neural

realizers of conscious experiences must be trace integrated, since trace integration is a

necessary condition for temporal information to be “accessible to post-perceptual

processes like verbal report, high-level motor control and domain-general reasoning”

(15). He thinks that we should assume, in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary,

that experiential contents are accessible to these processes, and so perceptual experience

never conforms to the matching thesis.

27 A controversial reason to make this claim would be if one accepts presentism: the view that only temporally present states of affairs exist. If presentism is correct, there can be no relations of diachronic unity, because such relations would have to involve non-existent relata. But the extensionalist is more likely to see this as a reason to reject presentism than extensionalism. See Frischhut (2017) for discussion of presentism’s compatibility with various views of temporal experience.

44

Lee’s argument is an interesting and substantive challenge for extensionalists, but

not a straightforward refutation. The problem is that even if one admits that trace

integration must occur for temporal information to be accessible to post-perceptual

processes, it is unclear why already being trace integrated is a necessary condition for

temporal information to count as accessible to those processes (in the sense of ‘accessible’

relevant to the argument). Trace integration could be part of the process by which

temporal information latent in the neural events underlying experiences is accessed by

post-perceptual processes.28 In this case, a perceptual experience representing temporal

features need not be trace integrated to count as accessible, as long as it is possible for its

contents to become trace integrated as they are taken up by post-perceptual systems. It

might well be that information must be reformatted—that is, translated from a temporal

code to a non-temporal code—to be used by post-perceptual processes. But the claim that

the need for reformatting implies that the information is inaccessible is not obvious, and

Lee’s argument seems to rely on this claim. Hence, the extensionalist has a reasonable

defense against the argument.

Rather than attempting to show why the matching thesis must be false in light of

general considerations about awareness or perceptual information processing, the

arguments I will focus on in this chapter attempt to provide counterexamples to the

thesis. Unlike the previous strategies, this strategy will not yield an argument that one’s

experience never temporally matches the events one experiences. Counterexamples will

not by themselves show that the PSA is true, or that experiential neural events must be

trace-integrated.

28 See Viera (2019) for a similar objection to the trace integration argument.

45

The most widely discussed kind of counterexample in the literature is postdiction

(or postdictive effects): a phenomenon where a subject presented with an earlier stimulus,

called the target, and a later stimulus, called the modulator, reports experiencing the target

in a manner affected by the modulator. Examples were discussed earlier by Goodman

(1978), but Dennett’s work is chiefly responsible for interest in such effects among

philosophers (Dennett 1991; Dennett and Kinsbourne 1992). Dennett discusses a variety

of such effects, including apparent motion, backward masking and the ‘cutaneous rabbit’

illusion. In the relevant cases of apparent motion, two dots close together in space are

flashed before a subject in quick succession. The subject reports seeing not two discrete

flashes, but rather a single dot moving between the location of the first flash and the

second.29 The cutaneous rabbit is an illusion that occurs when a series of taps is applied

to a subject’s arm (Geldard and Sherrick 1972). The first group of taps all occur at the

wrist. The next group occur further up the forearm and the group after that near the

elbow. If the time between taps is short enough, instead of feeling three groups of taps in

three places, subjects report feeling a series of evenly spaced taps, as if a rabbit is hopping

steadily up their arms (hence the name ‘cutaneous rabbit’).

These effects present a puzzle. In the case of apparent motion, when the second

flash does not appear, the dot appears to be stationary at the position of the first flash;

when it does appear, the dot appears to move. But this implies that the appearance of the

second dot affects the way the first appears. Did the subject see a moving dot before the

29 The phenomenology of apparent motion is contested. Some philosophers, including Dennett, suppose that subjects experience the dot as occupying intermediate positions between the location of the first flash and the second. But Hoerl (2015) argues that this is not obviously so: there might be a subjective impression of motion without an experience of the dot traversing the intermediate positions. I will accept Dennett’s description of apparent motion phenomenology for the sake of argument, but the conclusions of this chapter will not depend on it.

46

second dot appeared? That would involve backward causation, which is surely not the

right explanation. In the case of the cutaneous rabbit, if the second group of taps does not

occur, the first group of taps all seem to occur in the same place—at the subject’s wrist.

But, if the second group of taps occurs, the first group of taps seem to be spaced out

evenly—they seem to ‘hop’ up the arm. But how can this happen? It seems that the way

the first group of taps is experienced depends on a future event—but, again, it is not at

all plausible that the illusion genuinely involves the future causally affecting the past.

The puzzle is to explain how the phenomenal character of your perceptual experience of

some event can apparently depend on the occurrence of a later event without invoking

backward causation.

Why is this puzzle relevant to the matching thesis? It is because at least one way

of resolving it creates clear problems for the thesis. Grush argues that temporal illusions

like postdiction illustrate that temporal experience is a matter of “interpretation and

construction” and that “in at least some cases the interpretation of an event at some time

is driven by things sensed after that event occurs” (2007a, 13). He claims that this conflicts

with extensionalism. Considering the cutaneous rabbit illusion, he writes:

… even though at the time of the second impulse the subject perceives it to be at the wrist, at the time of the fifth impulse, the subject has no recollection of this prior interpretation, and rather has a perceptual state to the effect that there is currently a sequence of impulses, the second of which was just proximal to the wrist. (2007, 13)

On Grush’s view, the subject has an initial experience of the target (the first group of taps)

that is quickly forgotten and replaced by an experience that represents both the

modulator and the target (updated in light of the modulator). This is possible because on

47

his trajectory estimation model, a perceptual state can represent a sequence of events and

their temporal features. Such experiences project both slightly backwards and slightly

forwards in time, and the intervals covered by successive experiences overlap. When the

estimate of the environment represented in one perceptual state is revised in the next, the

original estimate is forgotten.

Grush’s view is that contrary to the matching thesis, the temporal characteristics

of the perceptual state do not constrain its capacity to represent time. If the matching

thesis were correct, you could experience the taps as hopping up your arm only by having

a succession of experiences of each tap. But Grush’s view is that you can experience the

taps as hopping simply by having a (partly backward-looking) experience that represents

the whole sequence of evenly-spaced taps. In general, his model implies that a perceptual

state occurring over some interval can represent a sequence of events spanning a greater

interval. This contradicts the matching thesis, because the thesis implies that the only way

that perceptual experience can present a sequence is by matching its temporal structure

and so there can be no representation of a sequence all at once. For the extensionalist, no

experiential state can represent a sequence; only a sequence of experiences can.

2.2 Postdiction and the Matching Thesis: Pre or Post-Experiential Influence?

Grush’s argument against the matching thesis depends on a controversial model

of how postdiction works. Dennett, in his original discussion, identifies two possible

models. The model Grush seems to endorse is what Dennett calls ‘Orwellian revision’

(alluding to 1984’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ which shaped public opinion by falsifying records

of historical events). According to this model, the subject of the illusion initially

48

experiences the target stimulus as it actually is, before the modulator can affect the way

it appears. But when the modulator stimulus is presented, the brain revises its initial

interpretation of the target. It ‘overwrites’ that initial experience with a new one,

influenced by the modulator. The revision is not noticed, and the original experience is

immediately forgotten. For example, in the case of the cutaneous rabbit illusion, the first

group of taps are initially experienced as located at the wrist. But once the later taps occur,

the subject has a ‘backwards looking’ experience of them as moving and forgets that they

ever appeared differently. Grush’s trajectory estimation explanation for postdiction is an

instance of the Orwellian strategy.

The other explanation Dennett proposes is what he calls ‘Stalinesque delay’

(alluding to Stalin’s show trials in which the verdict was decided and the evidence

manipulated accordingly before the trial even began). According to this explanation,

there is a substantial delay between the presentation of the target stimulus and the

subject’s experience of it. The delay is long enough that the brain can use information

about the later modulator stimulus to influence its initial interpretation of the target (the

Time

Presentation of Target

Initial Experience of Target

Presentation of Modulator

Experience of Modulator and Backwards-looking, Revised Experience of Target

Influence of Modulator on Processing of

Target

Figure 1: The Orwellian Revision Model

49

delay must be somewhere between 100-300 milliseconds to account for the various cases

of postdiction). For example, in the case of the cutaneous rabbit illusion, the subject’s

initial experience is of the taps as hopping, and no revision occurs. The delay allows for

the initial experience to take into account information about the second group of taps.

Orwellian and Stalinesque models of postdiction agree that information about the

modulator stimulus influences the way that the target stimulus is experienced—what

they disagree about is when this influence occurs in the chain of processing. According

to the Orwellian interpretation, the influence takes place after the target is initially

experienced. At this point, the system’s representation of the event is revised, and the

new version replaces the old in the subject’s memory. According to the Stalinesque

interpretation, the influence takes place before the initial experience of the target, so no

revision or replacement in memory is required.

For the reasons I explained, I think that Orwellian explanations of postdiction,

including Grush’s, are indeed inconsistent with the matching thesis. But, as Dainton

(2008) argues, there seems to be no conflict between the matching thesis and a Stalinesque

Time

Presentation of Target

Presentation of Modulator

Experience of Target

Experience of Modulator

Influence of Modulator on Processing of

Target

Figure 2: The Stalinesque Delay Model

50

model of postdiction. Recall that the matching thesis is about a match between the

temporal arrangement experienced and the temporal arrangement of experience—it is

not about an apparent match in temporal locations. The Stalinesque model has no

difficulty accommodating a match in temporal arrangement. This is because the model

allows that the modulator can influence the target before the initial experience of the

target. As Dainton puts it,

[i]t is arguably more plausible to construe perceptual contents as representations that are generated in the brain only after a good deal of processing. This processing makes for a delay—50-100 msec, say—but our brains put this to good use: they try to work out a single, coherent version of events on the basis of the fragmentary and (at times) conflicting data available to them. Only this ‘final draft’, as it were, reaches consciousness. (2008, 381-2)

On this explanation of the phenomenon, no backward-looking experiences, which would

violate the matching thesis, are required. When the processing of the event eventually

reaches consciousness, the temporal arrangement that the subject experiences matches

the temporal arrangement of their experience. They experience the target as preceding

the modulator, and their experience of the target precedes that of the modulator. Imagine

a projectionist who receives a reel of film consisting of frames arranged in one order, and

then rearranges the frames into a different order before projecting them for the audience.

The temporal features that the audience perceives in the film depend on the arrangement

of the frames, and the arrangement is the result of the projectionist’s intervention between

receiving the film and projecting it.30 This, in broad strokes, is how the extensionalist can

30 This analogy helps to explain how the Stalinesque model is compatible with extensionalism, but extensionists should be wary of the homuncular character of the analogy. Comparisons between their

51

think about postdiction. This explanation does not threaten extensionalism or the

matching thesis.31

Which model is correct? Grush (2016) argues that Dainton’s Stalinesque response

introduces an implausibly large delay between a signal reaching sensory receptors and it

influencing conscious experience (at least 80-100 milliseconds to cover all cases of

postdiction). He points out that the delay must go over and above the delay required for

ordinary perceptual processing, and that it must be ubiquitous, since the perceptual

system cannot tell in advance whether a later stimulus will suddenly require an earlier

one to be reinterpreted.32 But Grush admits that the extensionalist has a possible retort

here, which is to say that conscious experience is epiphenomenal with respect to

theory and the idea of an ‘inner audience’ for perceptual experiences invite the complaint they have not solved the problem of temporal experience but merely pushed it back a step, since its resolution now depends on explaining the internal workings of the inner audience. Dennett believes that both models are inescapably wedded to this ‘Cartesian theatre’ picture of consciousness, and (as we shall see) that they should both be rejected. I disagree, but Dennett is correct to warn against the idea of an ‘inner theatre’ as genuinely explanatory. 31 Phillips (2014a) offers a different extensionalist response, which is that we cannot draw the relevant conclusions about temporal consciousness from these experiments because the extensionalist should hold that intervals of experience are “explanatorily or metaphysically prior” to the experiential instants contained within them (149-150). The idea is that the question of what the subject experiences at some instant t is to be addressed by considering what the subject experiences over some longer interval that includes t, rather than focusing on what goes on at t in isolation. In the postdictive cases, what the subject experiences at t when the target stimulus is presented depends (‘explanatorily’ or ‘metaphysically’ rather than causally) on whether t is part of an interval that includes the later presentation of the modulator. If he is right, then we do not need to decide between Stalinesque and Orwellian explanations of postdiction, and such effects are no threat to the matching thesis. I will not address this response here except to note that it postulates a kind of dependence where the phenomenal character of an experience at t is partly constituted by events later than t. I think we should avoid this result if we can. See Grush (2016, 23-28) for further criticism along these lines. 32 Arstila (2015) argues that one can avoid this consequence by accepting a ‘non-linear latency’ view. To illustrate using the example of apparent motion, Arstila’s view is that although perceiving the first stimulus as moving requires the registration of the location of the second stimulus, it is in principle sufficient for its retinotopic location to be determined; it is not required that it be processed in V1 (since V5 is sometimes activated faster than V1). Simply put, the view is that postdiction can be explained by recognizing the interactions between faster chains of perceptual processing (e.g., visual processing that bypasses V1) and slower ones, and this eliminates the need for the long, ubiquitous delay Grush describes. The possibility of such a view reinforces the need for additional arguments of the kind I develop in Section 2.4.

52

responses at such brief timescales. Ultimately, to assess the argument from postdiction

against the matching thesis, we need to determine whether or not certain very quick

reactions are consciously guided by experiences that are then immediately forgotten. This

is a hard question to answer.33 And this dialectical situation is anticipated in Dennett’s

discussion of postdiction, and he is pessimistic about the possibility of resolving it.

Dennett’s view is that the apparent difference between Orwellian and Stalinesque

models is illusory; there is no fact of the matter about whether the influence of the

modulator occurs before or after experience, and ultimately no fact about exactly when

our experiences occur. There are facts about when the signal from the stimulus reaches

sensory transducers, and about when behavioural responses to the stimulus occur, but

none about when representations of the stimulus become conscious between

transduction and response. Dennett supports this surprising view by arguing that the

alternative—that there is some ‘finish line’ of consciousness within the chain of

information processing in the brain—is committed to the claim that Orwellian and

Stalinesque models are genuinely different. But, he argues, we cannot possibly decide

between these models, either through experiment or introspection. Dennett and

Kinsbourne write that both models are “consistent with whatever the subject says or thinks

or remembers” and that even you as the subject experiencing postdiction “could not

discover anything in the experience from your own first-person perspective that would

favor one theory over the other” (1992, 193). They conclude, via some verificationist

reasoning, that the models do not genuinely differ.

33 See Chapter 5 Section 5.4 for further discussion of this issue.

53

Most responses to Dennett’s argument focus on the verificationist reasoning (see,

e.g., Seager 1993). But I want to focus on the prior conclusion that the models cannot be

empirically distinguished. One issue is that Dennett does not adequately distinguish

between the claim that both theories are consistent with all possible data and the claim

that no possible data could favour one theory over the other. It is one thing to claim that

there could be no deductive, non-ampliative inference from the data to the rejection of

one of the theories because they are both consistent with the data. It is another to claim

that there could be no ampliative inference, e.g., inference to the best explanation, from

the data to acceptance of either of the theories, because they are equally favoured by the

data. But I will set this objection aside for now, since I think that Dennett has identified a

genuine difficulty in testing which model is correct, even if his conclusion is overly

pessimistic.

To illustrate, suppose we want to test the Orwellian model’s implication that the

subject has an experience of the target stimulus before the influence of the modulator

takes place. We might ask subjects to press a button immediately when (and only when)

they experience, e.g., an unmoving flash, or a series of taps in the same location. But

Dennett and Kinsbourne claim that this test could not help us to decide between the

theories, since any such button press could be “premature” and “unconsciously (or

preconsciously) triggered.” The button press could not unambiguously count as a record

of the subject’s experience, and so would fail to refute the Stalinesque explanation.

Dennett and Kinsbourne’s argument for the empirical equivalence of the models

is not simply that one possible test could not distinguish them. Rather, the point of the

example is to suggest an argument that there is a general problem facing any test that

purports to decide between the models. I take the idea to be the following:

54

(1) For a test to decide between Orwellian and Stalinesque explanations, experimenters must determine whether subjects have an initial experience of the target stimulus before it is influenced by the modulator.

(2) After the modulator’s influence occurs, subjects can no longer reliably report on whether there was such an initial experience of the target (because the Orwellian model claims that after this point, the subject’s memory is tainted by the influence of the modulator, and so they have no access to any previous experience of the target).

Therefore, (3) for a test to decide between these explanations, it must measure subjects’

reactions to the target stimulus before the modulator’s influence occurs. (4) To determine whether subjects have an initial experience of the target, a test

must be able to distinguish between a consciously controlled reaction to the target and an unconscious reaction.

(5) We cannot measure the difference between conscious and unconscious reactions in cases where the hypothesized conscious experience that guides the reaction is immediately forgotten (as the Orwellian model claims it is).

Therefore, (6) no experimental test can determine whether the Orwellian or Stalinesque

explanation is correct.

How convincing is this argument? Premise (5) in particular seems dubious—it’s

not clear that we should accept that a reaction guided by a quickly forgotten conscious

experience is indistinguishable from an unconscious reaction. Admittedly, the subject

will not be in a position after the trial to reliably tell us whether they had such an

experience of the target and whether it caused them to react as they did. But there may

be other ways of distinguishing consciously controlled reactions from unconscious ones.

Perhaps future neuroscience will help us to distinguish reaction from reflex by their

neural characteristics, without relying on subjective reports. As Block puts it in his

55

commentary, if there is an empirical difference between these models to be discovered,

then “ingenious experimenters will presumably find a way to get an experimental handle

on it” (1992, 205). That it is difficult to imagine a test for these rival hypotheses is not

compelling evidence against the possibility of such a test. Dennett fails to convincingly

argue that the difficulty here is principled rather than practical.

Nonetheless, I think we should admit that Dennett is right that there is a genuine

difficulty in testing these models, even if the difficulty is merely practical. And this

difficulty undercuts postdictive arguments against the matching thesis. In the next

section, I suggest a way of getting around it: by applying the explanatory strategies

embodied in Dennett’s models to a different case, where the experimental difficulties he

describes do not arise.

2.3 Simultaneity Perception and the Matching Thesis

We can move this debate forward by focusing on another case where there is an

apparent conflict between pre-experiential and post-experiential influence models: the

perception of simultaneity. It is an obvious but nonetheless remarkable empirical fact that

perceivers can accurately perceive simultaneous stimuli as simultaneous in a wide range

of conditions, despite significant differences with respect to the latency between each

stimulus and its effects on the perceiver. Vroomen and Keetels summarize:

… to perceive synchrony, the brain must deal with differences in physical and neural transmission times. Sounds, for example, travel through air much more slowly than does light (330 vs. 300,000,000 m/sec), whereas no physical transmission time through air is involved for tactile stimulation, which is usually presented directly at the body surface. The neural processing time also differs

56

among the senses, being typically slower for visual stimuli than for auditory stimuli (approximately 50 vs. 10 msec, respectively), whereas, for touch, the brain may have to take into account where the stimulation originated, because the traveling time is longer from the toes to the brain than from the nose... (2010, 871)

They go on to say that because of these latency differences, some have argued that there

should be a special distance from the observer around 15 metres—a “horizon of

simultaneity”—at which the differences in the processing speeds for vision and audition

would be offset by the difference between the time it takes sound and light to travel that

distance (Pöppel 1988). One might suspect that this distance from the observer is the only

place where objectively simultaneous auditory and visual events can be perceived as

simultaneous. But this is not so:

… despite these naturally occurring lags among the senses, observers perceive intersensory synchrony for most multisensory events in the external world and not only for those at 15 m. Only in exceptional circumstances, such as the thunder that is heard after the lightning, is a single multisensory event perceived as being separated in time. (Vroomen and Keetels 2010, 872)

Their point is that differences in the transmission times of the physical signals is not

usually a barrier to perceiving simultaneity. This is to say that multisensory simultaneity

perception exhibits a kind of perceptual constancy: a stability in perceptual response

throughout a variety of perceptual conditions (Kopinska and Harris 2004; Harrar and

Harris 2005; Harris et al. 2009). To achieve this constancy, the perceptual system must

adjust its response to account for these latency differences. But—as in the case of

postdiction—it is not immediately clear when in the chain of processing this adjustment

occurs.

57

Simultaneity experience, like postdiction, admits of two general kinds of

explanation: one involving pre-experiential influence and the other (at least possibly)

post-experiential influence. The first is closely tied to the Stalinesque delay explanation

of postdiction. It is what I will call the finish line model.34 According to this model, for two

events to perceived as simultaneous, the corresponding experiences must enter

consciousness at the same time; for two events to be perceived as non-simultaneous, the

experiences must enter consciousness at different times. Call the stage of processing

required for a signal to become conscious the ‘finish line’. The finish line model says that

perceptually experiencing events as simultaneous requires that the experiences of them

cross the finish line simultaneously. One might find it implausible that perceptually

experiencing simultaneity could require exact simultaneity between experiences. If there

is a ‘finish line’ of processing in the brain, it is extremely unlikely that distinct neural

events will cross it at precisely the same time. I will discuss a version of the finish line

model which relaxes this requirement shortly.

According to the finish line model, for the brain to account for differences in

transmission and processing times, it must sometimes delay the processing of one

stimulus so that it ‘crosses the finish line’ simultaneously with another. Like the

Stalinesque delay explanation of postdiction, the finish line model upholds a

commitment to the matching thesis by positing a significant delay between stimulus and

34 The name ‘finish line model’ is inspired by one of Dennett’s (1991) metaphors, standing for the kind of ‘Cartesian theatre’ view of consciousness he rejects: that there is a ‘finish line’ of consciousness in the brain. But the finish line model is not merely the idea that there is such a finish line (an idea it shares with the labeling model, as we shall see), but also that facts about temporal experience are determined by the order in which different chains of processing reach the finish line.

58

experience. And it holds that whatever processing is required to compensate for latency

differences between stimuli occurs before experience.

The other explanation is what I will call the labeling model. According to this model,

two events might be perceived as simultaneous despite the corresponding experiences

reaching consciousness at different times, or as non-simultaneous despite reaching

consciousness at the same time. Events can be ‘labeled’ as simultaneous by the perceptual

system despite the experiences of those events being non-simultaneous, and events can

be labeled as non-simultaneous despite the experiences being simultaneous. The model

itself is agnostic about how the brain labels events as simultaneous (or non-simultaneous);

it stipulates only that such labeling does not require simultaneity (or non-simultaneity)

of experiences. Like the Orwellian revision interpretation of postdiction, the labeling

model holds that the processing required to compensate for latency differences can occur

after one’s initial experience of a stimulus. And like Orwellian revision, the labeling

model is inconsistent with the matching thesis. It holds that the conditions for

experiencing stimuli as simultaneous (or not) is that representations of them are ‘labeled’

as simultaneous (or not) by the perceptual system. Simultaneity (or non-simultaneity) of

experience is not required.35

The finish line model and the labeling model disagree about the temporal layout

of very brief stretches of conscious experience, just as the Stalinesque and Orwellian

models do. If Dennett’s argument were sound, there would be no testable difference

35 One version of the labeling model might endorse the PSS and thus stipulate that for any temporal relationship between events to be experienced, the experiences of the events must occur simultaneously. The model would still disagree with the finish line model because it would say that experiencing non-simultaneity actually requires simultaneity of experiences.

59

between these models, because there would be no empirical differences between rival

models of experiential timing concerning such brief intervals. Any models that disagree

about exactly when a signal reaches consciousness between transduction and behaviour

cannot be meaningfully different, on Dennett’s view. But I will argue that these models

are not empirically equivalent. Recall that Dennett and Kinsbourne’s argument for

empirical equivalence involved the claim that we cannot distinguish conscious from

unconscious reactions if we are trying to test a hypothesis on which the subject

immediately forgets about the conscious experience guiding the reaction. I suggested that

it is difficult to see why making such distinctions is impossible rather than just difficult

in practice, but here we have a stronger reply: testing the difference between the finish

line model and the labeling model does not require that we distinguish conscious and

unconscious reactions in this way. The finish line model puts constraints on how

simultaneity perception works that the labeling model does not. Because of this, they

generate different testable predictions.

The requirement that stimuli perceived as simultaneous cross the finish line of

consciousness simultaneously rules out as impossible certain kinds of experiences that

the labeling model allows for. As stated, the finish line model implies that it is impossible

to have perceptual experiences of apparent violations of the transitivity of simultaneity.

The model implies that if you experience A and B as simultaneous and experience B and

C as simultaneous, then you cannot experience A and C as non-simultaneous. This is

because the model says that the transitive relation of ‘crossing the finish line with’ is

required for perceived simultaneity. But the labeling model involves no such

requirement, and so allows for possible experiences of apparent violations of transitivity.

The perceptual system might label A and B as simultaneous for different reasons than B

60

and C, and so fail to label A and C as simultaneous. Thus, these models make different

predictions about the kinds of experiences that are possible.

How can we determine if experienced simultaneity is necessarily transitive? Kelly

(2005) offers an a priori argument for the claim that events ‘seeming’ to be simultaneous

in perceptual experience cannot be a transitive relation, because we can construct a

temporal Sorites series of events, E1, E2… En, such that each event is temporally

indiscriminable from its successor ‘considered pairwise’ (that is, the subject cannot tell

which occurred first) but the first is temporally discriminable from the last.36 So, he

claims, E1 will seem simultaneous with E2, and so on for each event and its successor, but

E1 will seem non-simultaneous with En. The argument is structurally similar to familiar

arguments about the intransitivity of, e.g., sameness in colour appearance, where each

patch in a series is indiscriminable in colour from its successor, but the first patch is

discriminable from the last (Goodman 1951). But whatever one thinks about the Sorites

series of colour patches, it is unclear whether the Sorites series of events has the

implications Kelly claims. The problem is that we cannot assume that because E1 and E2

seem to be simultaneous when experienced ‘pairwise’ on their own, they will also be

seem to be simultaneous when experienced as part of the whole E1, E2… En series.37

Likewise, we cannot assume that because E1 and En seem to be non-simultaneous when

experienced on their own, they will also seem to be non-simultaneous when experienced

as part of the whole series. In general, there is no guarantee that the temporal relations

36 Kelly is unwilling to accept that experienced simultaneity is not an equivalence relation, and so he takes this argument to show that ‘seeming’ to be simultaneous in experience is not the same thing as experienced simultaneity. 37 This response is similar to Raffman’s “instability hypothesis” about experiences of comparing successive items pairwise in a phenomenal continuum (2012, 315).

61

you experience between two events when they are presented in isolation are the same as

those you would experience if the events were presented as part of a longer series. It is

true that when events are very close together in time, we cannot reliably report their

order. But it is nonetheless possible that perceptual experience groups events into a series

of discriminable, non-overlapping perceptual moments, and so always respects the

transitivity of simultaneity. Thus, we cannot determine a priori whether events seeming

to be simultaneous or non-simultaneous in perceptual experience is a transitive relation.38

The answer to that question, and the fate of the finish line model and the matching thesis,

must be discovered via experiment.

Suppose that an experiment demonstrates that perceived simultaneity is not

transitive (I will say more about how this might happen shortly). Would this really be a

problem for the finish line model? One might recall here that the matching thesis is

supposed to give a necessary rather than sufficient condition for the experience of

temporal features. Thus, they might reply that the finish line model should be understood

similarly as giving a necessary rather than sufficient condition for the experience of

simultaneity. If this is right, then perhaps there could be cases where the experiences of

A, B and C all enter consciousness simultaneously, but the subject experiences their

simultaneity relations selectively—perhaps A could be experienced as simultaneous with

B and B with C, but not A with C. If the finish line model gives a merely necessary

condition for perceived simultaneity, then it does not rule out such a case. But this

response is inadequate. First, if the subject experiences A and C as asynchronous, then the

matching thesis will be violated even if we interpret it as concerning only necessity—

38 For related criticisms of Kelly’s argument, see Arstila (2012b).

62

experienced non-simultaneity requires non-simultaneity of experiences on the matching

thesis.

But even if we suppose that the subject simply fails to experience any temporal

relationship between A and C (and so does not experience them as asynchronous), the

response does not seem viable. The extensionalist must believe that there is some extra

condition that must be added to the requirement of simultaneity of experiences to yield

a sufficient condition for experienced simultaneity.39 That such an extra condition is

required for the experience of temporal features is obvious in certain other cases: as

Phillips (2014b) points out, the extensionalist should admit that the experience of an

object moving very slowly (perhaps arriving at a discriminably different location only

after 5 minutes) is not an experience of change in position. This suggests that the

conditions for having an experience of change seem not to be met for experiences

separated by more than, say, a few hundred milliseconds. But how could this extra

condition, whatever it is, apply selectively to the objects of simultaneity experience in this

way? To illustrate, on Dainton’s (2000) version of extensionalism, the additional

condition is that the experiences must be unified, which he takes to involve a primitive

relation of co-consciousness holding between experiences. The relation can hold both

synchronically and diachronically, and its holding is supposed to explain how various

experiences can belong to the same subject, both at a time and across time. So on this

view, we know that the experiences of A, B and C are all unified, since we have stipulated

that a single subject is experiencing all three (it would be ad hoc to suggest that the

experience of A and B belongs to one stream of consciousness while that of B and C

39 Lee (2014a, 12) makes a similar point discussing a different objection to the matching thesis.

63

belongs to another). So, on this view, experiences of intransitive simultaneity are

impossible. The extensionalist might try offering alternative conditions here instead of

co-consciousness. For example, perhaps temporal experience requires that any events

that are experienced as temporally related are all selected by a single ‘act’ of attention.

But it’s hard to see how any such condition could apply intransitively in the relevant

cases: it is dubious that you could attentively highlight the temporal relationship between

A and B and between A and C without also highlighting the relationship between A and

C—at least not when the relationship in question is simultaneity.

Moving past the issue about sufficiency, the finish line theorist still has a

reasonable-seeming response, which is to deny that perceived simultaneity requires exact

simultaneity at the finish line. They can relinquish the unrealistic ‘strict’ version of the

finish line model and opt for a finish window model instead. On this model, there is a brief

temporal window of some duration d such that if two events are perceived as

simultaneous, the experience of each event must become conscious within d of the other

(and experienced non-simultaneity requires crossing in different windows). Crucially,

crossing the finish line within the same window is not a transitive relation: it might be

that A crosses within d of B, B crosses within d of C, but A does not cross within d of C.

So, the finish window model allows for failures of transitivity for perceived simultaneity.

And the model is consistent with the matching thesis, on the condition that we experience

only approximate, rather than exact, simultaneity. If we experience events as only

approximately simultaneous, then the matching thesis requires only that the experiences

of them are approximately simultaneous in the stream of consciousness.

This response avoids the result that the finish line model is inconsistent with the

possibility of transitivity failures, but it does not show that the labeling model and finish

line model make the same predictions about them. We can still tease these models apart

64

by thinking about the kinds of cases in which we might expect to observe transitivity

failures.

2.4 The Finish Line Model and the Labeling Model: Testable Differences

To illustrate how the observable predictions of these models differ, I want to

consider what I take to be the most compelling evidence for the idea that perceptual

systems compensate for latency differences between perceptual signals to achieve

simultaneity constancy. The evidence comes from experiments on simultaneity

recalibration: a paradigm in which subjects ‘adapt’ to a lag between multisensory stimuli,

where the adaptation changes the timing required for future stimuli to be experienced as

simultaneous or non-simultaneous (Fujisaki et al., 2004). In one such experiment, subjects

are exposed to a series of repeating tone/flash pairs, where the tone and flash are

separated by a short, constant delay. They adapt to pairs with a certain delay for about

three minutes. Afterwards, experiments show that subjects have ‘shifted’ their sense of

simultaneity to compensate for the lag. For example, after an adaptation phase where the

tone leads the flash, a subject presented with a flash and a tone that are objectively

simultaneous will judge that the flash occurred first. Presented with a pair where the flash

lags slightly behind, they will judge that the tone and flash are simultaneous.

Psychologists call this a change in the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS), which is

65

defined as the interstimulus interval (ISI) at which the subject will respond that two or

more stimuli are simultaneous.40

One might question whether this shift reflects a change in subjects’ perceptual

experiences of simultaneity or merely a change in their reports thereof. But the change

seems to be genuinely perceptual, because adaptation to the lagging audio-visual pairs

affects the timing required to induce other audio-visual illusions, like the bounce/pass

illusion (which I discussed in Chapter 1). In this illusion, subjects view an ambiguous

percept, where two dots can be seen as either crossing paths or colliding and bouncing

off one another. When an auditory cue is added at the moment of ‘contact,’ subjects more

frequently report seeing the dots as bouncing rather than passing. After the adaptation

phase in the simultaneity recalibration experiments, the experimenters find that the

auditory cue must be shifted (earlier or later, depending on the direction of lag in the

adaptation phase) to induce the bounce interpretation. Assuming that the bounce/pass

illusion is itself a perceptual effect, this shows that simultaneity recalibration seems to

affect perceptual processing directly rather than merely affecting post-perceptual

judgements and reports.

How does simultaneity recalibration work? The finish line and finish window

models will say that it must work by delaying the processing of one stimulus—either

auditory or visual—so that it reaches consciousness simultaneously (or approximately

simultaneously) with the other. But according to the labeling model, the effect need not

40 A related example comes from Stetson et al. (2006). They demonstrate that when subjects adapt to a fixed delay between their actions (keypresses) and their effects (flashes), subsequent trials where the delay is much shorter are reported as involving an order reversal between cause and effect; in other words, subjects report that the flash occurred before the keypress.

66

involve any such delay. Events might reach consciousness at different times but

nonetheless be ‘labeled’ as simultaneous.

There are two ways that we can think about the delay involved in the finish

line/finish window explanation. On the first way, adaptation causes the system to apply

the delay to the relevant stimulus automatically, regardless of what else is being

processed alongside it.41 On this view, we would expect the delay to generalize to other

modality pairings involving the original stimulus. Whether this occurs is a relatively

straightforward empirical question. Harrar and Harris (2005; 2008) found that while

recalibration can occur in any combination of three modalities (vision, audition and

touch), the effect does not generalize to modality pairings other than those affected in the

adaptation phase. So, for example, a shift in the PSS for audio-visual pairs seems not to

cause a shift in the PSS for tactile-visual pairs. This suggests that this first way of thinking

about the delay involved in the finish line model’s explanation is incorrect; simultaneity

recalibration seems not to involve the perceptual system simply ‘holding back’ one of the

stimulus types by a certain duration, regardless of what else is being processed. We are

forced to explain the delay mechanism in a different way.

On the second way of thinking about the delay, what adaptation to the lagging

stimuli pairs causes is not just a fixed delay for one kind of stimulus, but rather a

difference in when the system will group stimuli of two types together as simultaneous

41 One version of this view might involve the claim that all processing in one adapted modality would be delayed or sped up relative to that in the other. But this seems inconsistent with results from Rosebloom and Arnold (2011), who exposed subjects to audiovisual stimuli of men and women speaking, where the men’s voices preceded the video by 300 milliseconds and the women’s lagged behind it by 300 milliseconds. Afterwards, in the testing phase, they measured subjects’ PSSs using again images and sounds of men or women speaking and found that subjects had adapted to two different asynchronies: one for men, and a different one for women. The adaptation was not a general delay or boost in one modality; it was specific to the type of stimulus.

67

(or group them separately as non-simultaneous). On this version of the view,

simultaneity perception is the upshot of a perceptual process of temporally binding events

together, analogous to the process of binding perceivable qualities to locations.

Simultaneity recalibration shifts the timing required for this binding to occur for certain

stimuli types. Stimuli that would ordinarily have been bound together as simultaneous

might not be after adaptation, while stimuli that would not have been might be. And the

finish line model conceives of this binding as happening before the stimuli are sent to

consciousness.

The finish line/window model must conceive of the delay mechanism responsible

for simultaneity recalibration as one that binds events together and then sends them to

consciousness simultaneously, rather than one that simply holds back one event type by

a fixed duration. Now we are in a position to see why the labeling and finish line models

(even the finish ‘window’ version) are distinguishable through experiment. The ‘binding’

version of the finish line model generates different predictions about when we might

observe failures of transitivity for perceived simultaneity than does the labeling model.

To see why, consider a case where a subject’s sense of multimodal simultaneity has been

shifted in multiple ways at once. First, suppose that they have adapted to an audio-visual

lag such that to perceive a tone/flash pair as simultaneous, the tone must lead the flash

by d. Second, suppose that they have adapted to an audio-tactile lag such that to perceive

a flash/tap pair as simultaneous, the flash must lead the tap by d*. And finally, suppose

that d + d* is greater than the window within which the tone and tap would be perceived

as simultaneous, if presented on their own.

68

What happens when a subject is presented with a tone, flash, and tap, where the

tone leads the flash by d and the flash leads the tap by d*? Suppose that the subject

experiences the tone as simultaneous with the flash, the flash as simultaneous with the

tone, but fails to perceive the tone as simultaneous with the tap. Of course, we would not

expect subjects to describe their experience this way; this result would become clear only

by comparing judgments about simultaneity over multiple trials. The labeling model can

explain this result. The events could be labeled this way by the perceptual system, despite

the experiences becoming conscious at different times.42

As I argued above, on the ‘exact’ version of the finish line model, such an

experience is impossible, because ‘crosses the finish line exactly simultaneously with’ is

a transitive relation. On the other hand, the finish window model allows that there can

42 Strictly speaking, the labeling model is compatible with either result, since it could be that presenting the three stimuli together causes the perceptual system to ‘label’ them differently with respect to simultaneity and/or temporal order than it would if they were presented in pairs. That said, if we never observe failures of transitivity for perceived simultaneity, even in cases where we expect that the perceptual system is compensating for expected signal delays in ways that seem incompatible with transitivity, we might take this to support the finish line/finish window model, insofar as the model can neatly explain this result. Such a result would at least put the burden of proof on proponents of labeling (and critics of matching) to explain how and why the labeling operations of the perceptual system strictly adhere to transitivity.

69

be violations of transitivity for perceived simultaneity, since ‘crosses in the same window

as’ is not transitive. However, the finish window model cannot accommodate such a

violation in the case described.

The reason is that on the most plausible way of understanding the model’s

explanation of simultaneity recalibration—the ‘binding’ explanation—the model

conceives of perceptual systems as first determining which events are simultaneous with

each other, and then ‘sending’ them to consciousness together. But each event is sent only

once, and so the process could not be one that decides that A and B were simultaneous

and that B and C were as well, without also deciding that A and C were. If the system has

adapted to ‘expect’ that A and B are actually simultaneous when the signal from one is

slightly delayed relative to the other, it accounts for this expected latency by holding the

processing of one stimulus back so that it reaches consciousness simultaneously with the

other. It does the same for the expected asynchrony between B and C, and so it must

also—automatically and unavoidably—eliminate the asynchrony between the processing

of A and C. Retreating to the finish window model from the finish line model will not

help to avoid this consequence. If the delay mechanism works by binding events together

and then sending them to consciousness together, it can be expected to send A with C

whenever it sends A with B and B with C. There is no reason to expect that A and C will

end up in different windows when A and B are in the same window and B and C are as

well.

By analogy, consider two different ways of signifying that some objects belong to

a group. On the first way—analogous to the labeling model—you list the objects and

draw lines connecting them. Using this method, you could represent that A and B belong

to a group and that B and C belong to a group without representing that A and C do,

because although you have drawn a line connecting A with B, and drawn one connecting

70

B with C, you have not drawn one connecting A and C. On the second way, you simply

move the objects together in space, and count any objects placed together as belonging in

the same group. Using this method, whenever you group A with B and B with C, you will

thereby also group A with C. This second method is analogous to the binding version of

the finish line model. The upshot of this line of thought is that in the situation described

above, there is no reason to expect that when looking at the stream of experience, the tone

and flash will fall into the same simultaneity window, the flash and tap will fall into the

same window, and the flash and tap will not fall in the same window.

Could there be experiences of intransitive simultaneity? We are probably unable

to tell whether such an experience occurred simply by introspecting. But

psychophysicists have designed methods for measuring our experiences of simultaneity

and non-simultaneity with greater precision than is possible via introspection. To

evaluate whether experiences of non-transitive simultaneity are possible, one would

want to see what happens in an experiment where subjects undergo an adaptation phase

as I have described, involving three stimulus types, A, B, and C. Subjects should then be

presented with instances of A, B and C at different ISIs, and asked all three possible

questions about simultaneity between different pairs over many trials. We want to know

whether, when A, B, and C are presented together, the PSS for A and C is always equal to

the PSS for A and B plus the PSS for B and C. Are there circumstances where, if probed,

the subject would respond that A and B were simultaneous and would respond that B

and C were simultaneous, but would not respond that A and C were? Over enough trials,

we might come to discover that subjects are experiencing A and B as simultaneous and

experiencing B and C as simultaneous without experiencing A and C as simultaneous.

This would show the finish line/finish window model to be mistaken.

71

To my knowledge, no such experiment has been conducted. But experimenters

have tried to determine whether estimates of the PSS for different stimuli types—

measured in separate trials—are consistent with the hypothesis that the PSS for different

stimuli types is transitive.43 On this question, they have arrived at no definitive answer.

An early review article by Sternberg and Knoll (1973) asks whether estimates of the PSS

in previously conducted studies for pairs of different stimuli types are consistent with

the transitivity hypothesis. They find that the studies disagree: two studies give PSS

estimates consistent with transitivity (Corwin and Boynton 1968; von Békésy 1963), while

one gives estimates that are inconsistent with transitivity (Efron 1963). A more recent

study by Cardoso-Leite, Gorea and Mamassian (2007) produced PSS estimates

inconsistent with transitivity for different pairs of visual stimuli (Gabor patches differing

in contrast and orientation).

These older studies all looked at PSS estimates for stimuli in the same sensory

modality. A recent study by Machulla, Di Luca and Ernst (2016) asks whether the PSS for

cross-modal pairs of stimuli are consistent with transitivity, again measuring the PSS

separately. They find different answers, depending on the methods they use to estimate

the PSS. One method involves eliciting simultaneity judgments (SJ)—judgments about

whether two stimuli are simultaneous or not. On this method, experimenters use the ISI

(or stimulus onset asynchrony: the interval between the onset of the first stimulus and that

of the second) at which participants are most likely to judge that the stimuli are

43 Note that this is not the same as asking whether experienced simultaneity is always transitive. Such results might be suggestive for my purposes in this chapter. But because the PSS might be different for multiple stimulus pairs presented together than it would be for those pairs presented separately, the results will not help to answer with any certainty whether or not subjects can have experiences of transitivity failures.

72

simultaneous as the estimate of the PSS. The other method involves eliciting temporal order

judgments (TOJ)—judgments about which of two stimuli occurred first, where subjects

are forced to make a choice. On this method, experimenters use the ISI at which subjects’

responses are maximally uncertain (i.e., they are equally likely to give either response) as

the estimate of the PSS. The researchers found that the PSS estimates obtained using the

SJ method were consistent with transitivity, but those obtained using the TOJ method

were not.

Machulla et al. interpret this result as demonstrating that the SJ task provides a

more accurate estimate of the PSS. They offer an ‘educated guess’ that the TOJ task

produces intransitive PSS estimates not because perceived simultaneity is intransitive,

but because of a shift in subjects’ decision criterion (1036). A decision criterion is a concept

from signal detection theory of a threshold of perceptual signal that the subject uses to

‘decide’ how to respond. Decision criteria are infamously sensitive to biases, often

induced by factors that are obviously irrelevant to perception (e.g., in a detection task,

the criterion will be low if you offer monetary incentives for true positives, but high if

you threaten monetary penalties for false positives). Because of this, psychologists often

take criterion shifts to reflect only post-perceptual biases or response strategies rather

than the subject’s perceptual experience. This is how Machulla et al. interpret their

results. They suspect that in the SJ and TOJ tasks, bias is more likely to cause a subject’s

pattern of responses to drift away from consistency with transitivity than towards it. As

they put it, “[i]ncidental transitivity resulting from consistent postperceptual answer

strategies is unlikely” (1036). Whatever post-perceptual response strategy the subjects

employ, it would be unlikely to produce results consistent with transitivity across trials.

Such results would either be extremely serendipitous or require a great deal of careful

planning and manipulation. The authors conclude that the best explanation for the data

73

is that the contents of the subjects’ perceptual experiences conform to the transitivity of

simultaneity in both tasks, while the contents of their judgments across multiple trials

conform to transitivity only in the SJ task.

Can we conclude from this that perceived simultaneity is transitive across

modalities, consistent with the finish line model? Such a conclusion would be too quick.

Machulla et al.’s results suggest that for certain multisensory stimuli in ordinary (non-

adapted) perceptual conditions, the PSSs for different stimulus combinations are

consistent with transitivity. But the clearest case of perceptual systems actively

compensating for latency differences is simultaneity recalibration (i.e., adaptation), and

we do not know whether transitivity holds in such cases. More work is needed to

determine whether the transitivity hypothesis about perceived simultaneity can survive

experimental scrutiny, and whether simultaneity perception research will yield a

compelling argument against the matching thesis.

2.5 Concluding Remarks

The debate between extensionalists and their critics about the temporal

organization of perceptual experience faces a potential stalemate, because of the

extensionalist’s capacity to explain what seem to be counterexamples to their view in

terms of a ‘Stalinesque’ delay before consciousness during which temporal experiences

are constructed. In this chapter, I have suggested one potential way to move past this

stalemate: by trying to determine whether this pre-experiential construction conforms to

the predictions of the matching thesis in other contexts. The example I have focused on

is simultaneity experience. If transitivity failures for perceptually experienced

74

simultaneity are possible, then the predictions of the matching thesis in this context are

incorrect. Whether experienced simultaneity is transitive and whether the finish line

model or the labeling model is correct are unsettled empirical questions, but they are

empirical questions nonetheless. Thus, we should not give in to Dennettian pessimism

about the matching debate: there are facts about the temporal microstructure of conscious

experience, and they are discoverable by science.

Because of this, I regard it as an open empirical question which of these views is

correct. Over the next three chapters, I will defend this position against arguments that

aim to show that atomism and retentionalism, but not extensionalism, are inconsistent

with introspectable phenomenological facts about experience, and thus can be rejected in

advance of the kind of scientific methods I have advocated. My aim will be to show that,

despite what some philosophers have claimed, the matching thesis is not supported by

perceptual phenomenology.

75

Chapter 3

Temporal Transparency and the Matching Thesis

In the previous chapter I suggested a method for resolving the philosophical

debate about the temporal structure of experience using the tools of experimental

psychology. In making this argument, I assumed (as others in the literature sometimes

have) that experimental results ought to guide our theorizing about the temporal features

of conscious experience. I have taken for granted that we cannot decisively answer the

relevant questions simply by carefully reflecting on our own temporal phenomenology:

neither the matching thesis nor its denial can be confirmed by simple introspection.

These assumptions are controversial. Some philosophers argue that by paying

attention to the phenomenal character of our experiences, we can discover temporal

phenomenal facts that support one theory over another, perhaps overriding experimental

evidence. If we can conclusively determine how perceptual experience is temporally

structured by simply introspecting, then we do not need to engage in complicated

inferences about the experimental predictions generated by rival models of the

underlying perceptual processes. Or if introspection provides strong evidence that the

matching thesis is true, then we at least need to appropriately weight that evidence in our

assessment of other arguments.

The existence of this disagreement, between those who think introspection can

settle questions about the temporal structure of experience (or at least provide strong

evidence) and those who think it cannot, is itself a puzzle. Why do some philosophers

think that the temporal features of perceptual experience are self-intimating while others

do not? Part of the answer is that philosophers disagree about whether and how the

76

transparency thesis about perceptual experience applies to the special case of temporal

features like simultaneity and succession. The transparency thesis, in its general form,

says that when you introspectively attend to your perceptual experience, you can attend

to the things you seem to perceptually experience and the properties they seem to have,

and that you cannot attend to the experience itself or its properties.44 For example, when

you are visually experiencing a red coffee cup and you introspectively attend to your

experience, you can attend to the cup, its colour and its shape, but you cannot attend to

any intrinsic features of your experience of the cup, or your experience of its colour or

shape. According to the thesis, your introspective attention seems invariably drawn to

(what appear to be) ‘outer’ perceived items or events and their properties, rather than

any private ‘inner’ analogues for them.

If we straightforwardly apply the thesis to the case of temporal features, the claim

that temporal features of experience are self-intimating would be immediately

undermined. The temporal version of the transparency thesis would say that it is not

possible to introspectively attend to temporal aspects of your experiences—you can

attend only to the temporal aspects of the events you experience. Of course, outside of

dreamless sleep, you have constant conscious perceptual awareness of a stream of events

and their temporal properties and relations. But, according to the temporal transparency

thesis, careful reflection on this ‘stream’ of perceptual consciousness suggests that it is

composed exclusively of the events you perceptually experience and their apparent

temporal properties and relations. You do not seem, in addition, to enjoy introspective

44 This version of the thesis closely follows Harman’s (1990) formulation. The idea can be traced back to Moore’s (1903) remarks about the ‘diaphanousness’ of experience.

77

awareness of the psychological events of experiencing such things or their temporal

relations

If this line of thought is correct, then reflection on the temporal phenomenal

character of experience will not directly reveal anything about experience’s own temporal

structure. But some philosophers have suggested that we should not straightforwardly

apply the transparency thesis to the case of temporal features, leaving space for the

possibility that first-personal reflection is a good method for discovering facts about the

temporal structure of experience (Phillips 2010; 2014a; 2014b; Soteriou 2013). These

philosophers might be sympathetic to the straightforward transparency thesis for other

features, but they think that temporal features are a special case. And, as we shall see,

they take introspective reflection on the stream of consciousness to support the matching

thesis, since they claim that the temporal features of the events we perceptually

experience seem to perfectly mirror the temporal features of experience itself.

In this chapter, I defend the view that the transparency thesis applies

straightforwardly to the case of temporal features, blocking this kind of argument for the

matching thesis. But I also aim to explain why this disagreement occurs: why some

philosophers think that conscious experience is temporally self-intimating, and others

think that it is not. As Hoerl (2018) notes, this disagreement seems puzzling, since some

of the philosophers who argue that we can introspectively discern experience’s own

temporal features claim to be upholding a version of the temporal transparency thesis. A

satisfying solution to the question about transparency and time should not only provide

an argument for one answer or another, but should also explain what it could be about

temporal phenomenology that gives rise to this disagreement in the first place.

My explanation will be that although we cannot directly introspectively attend to

the temporal features of perceptual experience, we have a kind of indirect access to those

78

features—a kind of access that does not exist for other perceptual qualities like colour or

shape. There are other mental states that are not temporally transparent that cause and

are caused by perceptual experiences. These include perceptual judgments and conscious

decisions to move one’s body or direct one’s attention. The timing of such mental states

seems to causally depend on (in the case of judgments) and causally determine (in the

case of decisions) the timing of one’s perceptual experiences. Since such mental states are

not temporally transparent, they constitute a kind of indirect measure of the temporal

order of one’s perceptual experiences. Thus, there is some truth to the claim that we have

introspective access to the temporal structure of perceptual experience. This view can

explain why introspective reflection on our experience might seem to support the

matching thesis. However, the measure that non-perceptual mental states provide is not

perfectly precise. Rival theories about the temporal structure of experience disagree about

experiential timing during intervals of tens or hundreds of milliseconds. I will argue that

we should be skeptical about our capacity to introspectively discern anything about the

timing of experience at such timescales through this indirect method, despite the fact that

we are capable of perceptually discriminating the temporal order of external events at

such timescales.

Phenomenological intuitions, including those about transparency, are notoriously

diverse. With that in mind, we can distinguish between an ambitious aim of this chapter

and a more modest one. The ambitious aim is to convince the reader that the temporal

transparency thesis is true in its strongest form. The more modest aim is to show that the

thesis expresses a coherent conception of perceptual phenomenology, one with resources

to explain some of the phenomenological intuitions held by its opponents. My hope is

that even if the reader is left undecided about temporal transparency, they will

nonetheless agree that the introspective argument against the matching thesis is not

79

compelling, and that the denial of the matching thesis is a defensible position, even in

light of phenomenological considerations.

3.1 Transparency and Time

The transparency thesis about perceptual experience is widely accepted among

representationalists, who believe that the phenomenal properties of perceptual experience

are constituted by representational properties, and among naive realists, who believe that

the phenomenal properties of veridical experience are constituted (in part) by the external

objects one perceives and their properties. Representationalists and naive realists

generally agree that perceptual experience seems to its subject to involve contact with an

external scene involving objects or events, their properties, and relations among them.

They also tend to agree that perceptual experience does not seem to involve awareness

of any introspectable mental items or properties (e.g., sense-data, or what Harman (1990)

calls ‘mental paint’), or of relations among such things.45 These two claims—the positive

claim about what perceivers seem to be aware of, and the negative claim about what they

do not—are strictly independent. Thus, we can distinguish a positive transparency thesis

from a negative transparency thesis (Soteriou 2013). Nonetheless, both theses are

commonly accepted within the philosophy of perception. When I refer to the

45 The transparency claim concerns how experience appears or seems to its subject and thus cannot by itself establish anything about the actual nature of perceptual qualities. For an argument that transparency supports representationalism, see Tye (2002). For an argument that it supports naive realism, see Kennedy (2009). For an argument that transparency supports neither view, see Gow (2016). I do not assume in this chapter that transparency supports any view about the mind-independent nature of perceptual qualities.

80

‘transparency thesis’ throughout, I intend the conjunction of both the positive and

negative theses.

Philosophers have fiercely debated whether there are exceptions to the general

transparency thesis: that is, whether there are objects or features that we seem to be aware

of in perceptual experience that do not seem to be objects or features of the external scene

as we experience it. For example, Block argues that counterexamples to the thesis include:

the blur of blurry vision, differences between sense modalities in the experience of

common sensibles such as shape, and changes in perceived contrast caused by shifts in

attention (Block 1996; 2010). A common theme among these alleged counterexamples is

that they concern the apparent manner in which some object, property or event is

experienced. If the transparency thesis is universally correct, then questions about the

manner of experience—about how we experience something—should be irrelevant to

characterizing perceptual phenomenology. Transparency implies that we can

exhaustively characterize perceptual experience by simply cataloguing what we

experience.

In the context of the debate about transparency, we might wonder whether the

thesis true of temporal features, like temporal order, simultaneity, or duration. If it is,

then these features should always seem to us to be features of external events, and never

to be features of our experiences themselves. This is the view of Tye (2003). He illustrates

his position by asking us to consider a case of visually experiencing a red flash as

preceding a green flash:

Here I experience two flashes as occurring one after the other. I do not experience my experience of a red flash as succeeding my experience of a green one any more than I experience my experience of a red flash as red. (2003, 90)

81

If transparency is straightforwardly true of temporal features, then it would misdescribe

your experience to say that it seems to you that your experience of the red flash comes

first, or that it seems that you became aware of the red flash before you became aware of

the green flash. What you seem to experience is the order among the flashes, not among

the experiences.

Intuitions about temporal transparency are tricky to pin down. On the one hand,

experience obviously seems to be a kind of process that unfolds over time. We certainly

seem to be able to make certain judgments about its temporal organization: for example,

the judgment that your visual experience of this sentence occurred after your visual

experience of the previous sentence. I will have much more to say about this shortly. But

on the other hand, one can also argue that the intuitive argument for transparency is

especially strong in the temporal case.

Consider the experience of watching and listening to a pianist play an ascending

C major scale. If you were to introspect the temporal features of this perceptual

experience, you would find that your attention would land on the temporal features of

the audible events that you experience rather than the experiences themselves, which

might be introspectively distinguished from the audible events. For example, suppose

you were to try using introspection to tell how long your auditory experience of the first

note, C, lasts for before your experience of the second note, D, begins. It is dubious that

you could do anything besides attend to the note itself and pay attention to how long it

seems to last for. And suppose you wanted to answer, again via introspection, whether

your auditory experience of the second note, D, began at the same time as your visual

experience of the pianist pressing the D key. Again, it seems plausible that you would

simply attend to when the sound of the D began, and when the D key was pressed, and

attempt to answer whether those occurrences seemed simultaneous. In neither case do

82

you seem to be able to directly introspectively answer the original question about the

timing of your experiences themselves. And when you pay attention to features like

duration and temporal order, it does not obviously seem to reveal anything about the

manner in which you experience these features, where the manner is an aspect of the

experience itself. (Compare this to, e.g., shape, which can seem to be experienced in

different ways depending on whether it is seen or felt).

To further illustrate this point, suppose that you begin to notice that when you

listen to a piece of music with a fast tempo, it makes slower music seem even slower than

it would normally for a brief period. Now suppose that you are comparing the experience

of listening to the pianist play the C major scale at what you know to be the same tempo,

before and after listening to a different piece of music with a fast tempo. You might know

that what’s different between these two experiences is not the tempo you actually hear,

and that the difference must be a difference in how you experience them. But if you try to

get an introspective grip on the apparent difference between the experiences, you will be

unable to find anything to fix your attention on besides the apparent speed of the notes

being played.46 So even when an apparent temporal feature like speed or duration

intellectually seems to be a feature of your experience, it will nonetheless

phenomenologically seem to be a feature of the events that you experience.

One might wonder here about the property of temporal presence. Perceptual

experience seems to present the events we experience as occurring now. But don’t our

46 A non-musical case makes the same point: velocitization is a kind of habituation to speed that causes one to misjudge how fast they are moving. For example, drivers switching from highway speeds to non-highway speeds often think they are travelling slower than they really are. But velocitization is not experienced as a change in the manner in which one perceptually experiences speed, even if one knows that is what it really is. Rather, it is experienced as a change in speed.

83

perceptual experiences also seem to be occurring now? And if they do, shouldn’t we say

that perceptual experiences are not temporally transparent, since there is a temporal

property (namely, temporal presence) that seems to be an introspectable element of

experience itself? As will become clear further on, I think this objection conflates two

different senses in which temporal aspects of our experiences might count as

‘introspectable’: one which is direct, and one which is indirect, mediated by our

awareness of the temporal aspects of other mental states, like perceptual judgments. I do

not mean to deny that we can give honest reports of what we are currently perceptually

experiencing. But I deny that when we do, we do so by directly introspecting a property

of temporal presence which our perceptual experiences seem to have. On my view, in

having perceptual experiences, it is the experienced events that (directly) seem to be

temporally present, not the experiences themselves.47 And, as I will argue in Chapter 4

and 5, I do not think that experience presents events as present by presenting them as

simultaneous with the experience itself.

Many philosophers find at least some form of the temporal transparency thesis

attractive. An exception is Lee (2014b), who argues that when we shift our attention

between items in a scene, we are aware of something changing in our experience without

being aware of any seemingly external change (the objects we experience do not seem to

be changing).48 Lee claims that this shows the temporal transparency thesis to be false:

47 There are some looming questions here about how perceptual experiences present events as temporally present if perceptual experience is temporally transparent, and whether their doing so is compatible with views that deny the matching thesis. These questions will be the topics of Chapters 4 and 5, respectively. 48 Block (2010) argues that attention changes visual phenomenal character in a way that cannot be accommodated by representationalists or naive realists, since the changes do not seem to correspond to changes in the accuracy conditions of the subject’s experience or changes in which external objects or properties they are perceptually related to. For example, an attended Gabor patch might appear higher in contrast than the same patch unattended, but (Block claims) there is no reason to count the attended

84

… visual awareness could have been designed to make you aware of the properties of external things without any experienced sense of visually exploring the world through controlled changes in attention, but this is not the experience we actually have. (2014b, 158)

The proponent of temporal transparency should concede that our overall experience

when we perceive includes a ‘sense of visually exploring the world through controlled

changes in attention.’ But one need not interpret this claim in a way that undermines

temporal transparency. When I am watching a baseball game, I am aware of directing my

gaze and shifting my visual and auditory attention, both in response to changes in what

I see and hear on the field and changes in my interest from moment to moment. But it is

one thing to claim that these exogenous and endogenous shifts in attention are part of my

overall experience of watching the game. It is another to claim that when I am aware of

such shifts, I also seem to be aware of my visual and auditory experiences themselves as

distinct from the objects or events I am experiencing. The transparency theorist should

admit that shifts in attention contribute to the overall phenomenology of perceptual

activities like watching and listening to the game, just as the agentive phenomenology of

directing one’s gaze or moving one’s body does. But they should deny that shifts in

attention cause phenomenological changes that are experienced as changes in perceptual

experience itself rather than either changes in the objects, events or properties one is

experience of the patch as accurate and the unattended experience as inaccurate (or vice versa). Nonetheless, I think Block’s examples are compatible with temporal transparency. The cases clearly seem to involve changes in how an experienced object or event appears to the subject rather than changes in how the psychological event of experiencing it appears (e.g., the patch appears higher in contrast, not the event of experiencing it). Thus, while Block’s argument might threaten the idea that the properties ascribed in perceptual experience are purely mind-independent, the kind of shifts that he is describing do not seem to threaten temporal transparency, since the cases do not seem to involve direct introspective awareness of temporal features of one’s experiences. Lee’s argument seems different, insofar as he is highlighting what seem to be introspectable psychological changes that accompany the exercise of attention in perceptual experience, rather than attention-driven changes in how experienced objects or events appear.

85

aware of, or changes in non-perceptual mental events (such as volitions and perceptual

judgments). Nonetheless, as we shall see in Section 3.3, I think that Lee is right that the

control of perceptual attention contributes to one’s sense of the temporal organization of

perceptual experiences, albeit indirectly.

Somewhat puzzlingly, in discussions of temporal transparency, some of the

philosophers who disagree with views of temporal transparency like Tye’s have claimed

not to be denying the thesis, and do not present temporal features as counterexamples to

the general transparency claim. Instead, they claim to be explaining the special sense in

which the notion of transparency applies in the temporal case. On such views, temporal

experience is a special case for transparency because of the way that perceptual

experience seems to unfold over time. For example, Phillips (2010) understands the

transparency thesis about temporal experience as the claim that experience has its own

temporal structure (in addition to the apparent temporal structure of the events one

experiences), but that

when one attends to that structure (that is: reflects upon its nature) it is rational to judge that one’s experience is temporally determined in some way (restricting one’s reflection to that experience alone) only by taking its temporal structure to mirror the apparent temporal structure of the world experienced… (2010, 183)

In another paper, Phillips expresses the same idea with the claim that “when we set-out

to describe our experience itself, we find ourselves doing so, at least partly, by attending

to its objects” and that when we do so, “it seems to us as that our experience itself unfolds

alongside, and in step with, the temporal phenomena which we find ourselves attending

to in reflecting on our experience” (2014a, 132). Phillips is therefore committed to the idea

that you can introspectively discern the temporal order among your experiences. What

86

makes experience nonetheless ‘transparent’ is that you do so by attending to the temporal

features of the events you experience and judging that their temporal features match

those of experience itself. Again, consider Tye’s case of the two flashes. Phillips’ view

implies that although Tye is correct that you cannot directly attend to the temporal

features of your experiences, it is nonetheless possible for you to discern the order among

them by judging that it mirrors the temporal order among the events that you experience.

In fact, Phillips thinks that the two sets of temporal features seem to mirror each other

perfectly. And that you can discern this order among experiences is supposed to be part

of the phenomenology of perceptual experience, in the sense that it is part of how your

experience seems when you simply reflect on it through introspection. In other words,

this claim about our capacity to discern temporal features of experiences is not supposed

to be a theoretical conclusion but rather a phenomenological one. Furthermore, Phillips

thinks that the phenomenological sense of ‘seeming’ at issue is factive: experience could

not seem (in that sense) to be a certain way without actually being that way (2010, 183-4).

If experience seems to have a certain temporal structure, it must actually have it.

Soteriou (2013) offers a similar version of a temporal transparency thesis. He

divides the thesis into a positive and a negative claim (although the two claims are

importantly different from the positive and negative claims that comprise the ordinary,

general transparency thesis which I discussed earlier). Soteriou’s positive claim of

temporal transparency is that “introspection of one’s experience seems to reveal (at least

often) not only objects and their properties, but also events” (89). His negative claim of

temporal transparency is that “[w]hen one introspects one’s experience, the temporal

location of one’s perceptual experience seems to be transparent to the temporal location

of whatever it is that one is aware of in having that experience,” and that one apparently

cannot “mark out the temporal location of one’s perceptual experience as distinct from

87

the temporal location of whatever it is that one seems to be perceptually aware of.”

Soteriou suggests that when we introspectively attend to our experiences, we seem to

become aware of the temporal location of two kinds of events: the external events we seem

to perceive, and our experiences themselves. This seems to contradict the negative claim

which partly comprises the general transparency thesis. Nonetheless, we can think of

Soteriou’s claim as a version of a transparency thesis insofar as it maintains that we

apparently cannot distinguish these two temporal locations. In saying that the temporal

location of experience is “transparent to” the temporal location of experienced events,

Soteriou seems to be in agreement with Phillips that we become introspectively aware of

the temporal location of perceptual experience by focusing our attention outwards on the

events we experience.

Phillips and Soteriou each take their version of transparency to imply further

claims about the temporal metaphysics of experience—in particular, Phillips thinks that

it allows us to phenomenologically verify the matching thesis, and Soteriou thinks it

generates an argument against representationalism.49 But which account of temporal

transparency is correct: Tye’s strong version, on which temporal perceptual awareness is

exhausted by the events we experience and their temporal relations, or Phillips’ and

Soteriou’s weak version, on which experience seems to mirror the temporal structure of

the events we experience? My sympathies in this debate lie with the proponents of strong

49 Roughly, Soteriou’s argument is that for the representationalist, an experience of change is an experiential state that represents change. An experiential state representing something doesn’t itself change over the interval during which it occurs (representational states ‘obtain’ rather than ‘unfold’ over intervals). But if the ‘negative’ temporal transparency claim is correct, then an experience of change must be a change in experience (because the apparent temporal locations of experience and what’s experienced match). So representationalism about experiences of change contradicts the ‘negative’ temporal transparency claim (see Soteriou 2013, Chapter 4).

88

temporal transparency. I think that the manner in which we experience temporal

phenomena in perception is not an introspectable element of perceptual

phenomenology—it neither seems to match nor to fail to match the temporal

characteristics of the events we experience. As Hoerl puts it in his defense of strong

temporal transparency, “[t]here is just no scope within a description of our experience of

temporal properties for a distinction between those experienced properties themselves

and a point in time from which they are experienced” (2018, 143). However, my aim for

the remainder of this chapter will not be to directly defend the strong version of the

temporal transparency thesis, but rather to show how proponents of the thesis can

explain some of the intuitions that motivate their opponents. I think that even if strong

temporal transparency is true, we need some explanation for why it might seem false,

and for why the matching thesis seems phenomenologically plausible. According to the

view I shall defend, Phillips’ and Soteriou’s proposals each draw on a genuine feature of

temporal phenomenology but mischaracterize it. We can explain their phenomenological

motivations without admitting that the matching thesis is correct or that we have

infallible access the temporal structure of experience via introspection.

3.2 Temporally Opaque Mental Events

The temporal transparency thesis is at least plausible as a claim about perceptual

experience but obviously false as a claim about non-perceptual mental events. If you

visually experience a red flash as preceding a green flash, it might plausibly seem to you

that you can attend to the temporal order among the flashes, but not the temporal order

among your experiences of them. But later, if you judge or remember that the red flash

89

occurred first, your judgments and memories will not conform to temporal transparency.

You remember the flashes occurring an hour ago, and your memory of it seems to occur

in the present. So, it will not seem that you can attend only to the temporal location of the

flashes, and never to the temporal locations of the acts of judging or remembering. From

your perspective, the temporal location of the act of memory will seem obviously distinct

from that of the remembered event. Or consider the mental event of deciding to watch the

display of the two flashes again later. The temporal location of the decision will seem

clearly distinct from the (future) temporal location of what you have decided to do.

In remembering, judging, imagining, and deciding, one does not seem to ‘see right

through’ the mental event, as one does in perceiving. I will call such mental events

temporally opaque. A mental event is temporally opaque just in case it seems to its subject

that they can become directly aware, via introspection, of its temporal location and

distinguish its temporal location from that of its objects. This is meant to rule out the

event being temporally transparent in Tye’s strong sense. It is also meant to rule out

events being temporally transparent in Phillips’ or Soteriou’s weaker sense, where a

subject’s awareness of the temporal location of the mental event seems to depend on their

awareness of the temporal location of that which the mental event is directed upon. When

you make a judgment, nothing about the episode of judging suggests that it would be

appropriate to infer that the temporal location of the judgment mirrors the temporal

location of the event the judgment is about. For example, when you judge that it rained

yesterday, you obviously should not infer that the episode of judging also occurred

yesterday.

I need to make two clarifications about the idea of mental opacity. The first is that

the claim that some mental events are temporally opaque does not entail that these events

are non-transparent in other respects, or that such mental events must have their own sui

90

generis phenomenal character. Some philosophers will insist that mental acts like judging

or remembering possess no distinctive phenomenal character of their own.50 Perhaps we

come to know about our non-sensory mental states like beliefs and memories only

indirectly, through clues including sensory mental imagery (Carruthers 2011). Or

perhaps the phenomenology of non-sensory mental occurrences is nothing over and

above such sensory imagery (Prinz 2002, 2011a). One might worry that such views are in

conflict with the proposal that non-sensory mental events are temporally opaque. How

could a mental event have an apparent temporal location if there’s nothing it’s like to

undergo it? But this worry is misguided, since mental opacity concerns how things

appear to the subject, and no one should dispute that subjects seem to be introspectively

aware of acts like judging and remembering. The proposal is consistent with the idea that

they are never in fact directly aware of such acts, and that self-knowledge of non-sensory

mental events is always in some way grounded in one’s awareness of sensory mental

imagery. The mental imagery, which allegedly undergirds our reports about our

cognitive and volitional mental states, is temporally opaque as well. It should be common

ground within these debates that subjects seem to be introspectively aware of cognitive

and volitional mental events, and that the temporal locations of such events do not seem

to match that of their objects.

A second clarification is that I do not mean to imply that we seem to have any

special kind of de re access to the time of a mental act, which would apparently reveal

anything intrinsic about the time itself. For example, when I judge at 3 pm that the

50 See the introduction to Bayne and Montague (2011) for a useful overview of this issue. Advocates of this position include Nelkin (1989), Tye (1995) and Carruthers (2005, 2011).

91

meeting began at noon, I obviously cannot become aware via introspection that the

judgment occurred at 3 pm. My awareness of the temporal location of the judgment

seems to be restricted to facts about its temporal relations to other things that I am aware

of—e.g., other mental events, and the external events I experience. I seem to be aware of

how the mental event fits into my stream of mental activity—of what came before, after

or simultaneously—but not of any intrinsic, distinctive characteristics of the time that it

occurred. To illustrate, suppose that I suddenly realize, at 3 pm, that the meeting began

at noon and that I have missed it. It might seem to me that the realization happened right

after I was remembering our previous conversation about the meeting, or right after I

decided to check my schedule for the day. The realization might even seem to happen at

the same time as the clock strikes 3 pm, if I am watching the clock. But nonetheless, it

seems that my introspective awareness of the temporal location is restricted to how it is

temporally related to these other events that I am aware of. The realization does not come

with an intrinsic time stamp.

Temporal transparency and temporal opacity are supposed to be nothing more

than phenomenological observations about perceptual and non-perceptual mental

occurrences. But such observations call out for explanation. We might ask why some

mental states are temporally transparent and others are temporally opaque. Is temporal

transparency connected to other distinctive characteristics of perceptual states, and is

temporal opacity connected to characteristics of non-perceptual ones? Giving such an

explanation is not necessary for the argument of this chapter to succeed. That said, an

intriguing hypothesis to consider here is that there are connections between temporal

opacity and active aspects of mind, and between temporal transparency and passive

aspects of mind. Soteriou draws attention to this connection when he notes that the

temporal location of an imaginative act introspectively seems to be independent from the

92

apparent temporal location of that which is imagined (in other words, imagination is

temporally opaque). He suggests that this seems to be “connected with a distinctive

respect in which perception seems to one to be passive and not subject to the will” (90).

We might suspect then that the mental events that are temporally opaque are those that

are partly constituted by a feeling of voluntariness—of the subject doing something that

is, in some sense, under their control or for which they feel responsible. This is not to

claim that all temporally opaque mental events are fully voluntary, since some mental

occurrences, such as realizations and mental imagery, can seem to come to us unbidden.

Nonetheless, these occurrences seem to be agentive in at least the minimal sense that we

find ourselves apparently doing them or taking part in them as their agent. On the present

suggestion, this agentive component is connected to our capacity to distinguish the

apparent time of the occurrence from whatever time is involved in its content. Our

seemingly direct awareness of the temporal organization of our mental lives would be

grounded in our seemingly direct awareness of our mental acts.51 The temporal

transparency of perceptual experience would then be connected to the apparent absence

of such an agentive component. This is not to say that perception is in no sense active;

perception can involve activities like watching, listening, attending, and exploring. But

having perceptual experiences does not seem to constitutively involve the performance of

51 A difficult case for this suggestion is pains (and other affective sensations). Intuitively, such occurrences seem to be temporally opaque—they seem to be mental occurrences whose temporal location is knowable to their subjects. But pains are not mental acts—like perceptual experiences, they lack any feeling of voluntariness (even in the minimal sense described above). One response would be to insist that pains are in fact both perceptual and temporally transparent. On this view, pain-awareness is nothing more than awareness of some non-mental state of affairs (e.g., Cutter and Tye 2011). A more concessive response would be to admit that pains seem to be both non-perceptual and mental, and to weaken the proposal: being agentive might be sufficient for a mental occurrence to be temporally opaque, but not necessary. Perhaps temporal transparency involves not just an apparent absence of agency but also an element of apparent mind-independence.

93

such activities. And perceptual experience does not seem agentive in even the minimal

sense—a visual experience is not a mental action, and I do not seem to be the agent of my

visual experience. So, if a feeling of voluntariness is necessary for temporal opacity,

perceptual experience will not be temporally opaque. This proposal is speculative, but it

hints at how we might give an explanation for the connection between perception and

temporal transparency that is rooted in familiar characteristics of perception.

3.3 Temporal Opacity and the Apparent Temporal Structure of Experience

With the notion of a temporally opaque mental events in hand, I will now explain

how we can vindicate a strong conception of temporal transparency while explaining the

phenomenological intuitions motivating proponents of weak temporal transparency. The

basic idea is that although perceptual experience is temporally transparent, it is

constantly accompanied by mental events that are temporally opaque—that is, mental

events whose temporal features seem to their subjects to be directly accessible via

introspection. Some of these mental events seem to their subjects to indirectly reveal facts

about the temporal structure of perceptual experience itself, because they seem to

predictably cause changes in, or to be caused by changes in, what one is perceptually

experiencing.

Recall the strong version of temporal transparency, which implies that if you

perceptually experience one flash as succeeding another you do not experience your

experience of the first flash as occurring first. Such an account would be implausible if it

implied that you could never know the temporal relations among your experiences.

Phillips takes this to be a serious problem for the strong version of the thesis:

94

Next time you see the traffic lights change from amber to red, stop and consider: which experience came first, your experience of the red light, or your experience of the amber light? I predict that you will be able to answer knowledgably and with ease that your experience of the amber light occurred before your experience of the red light. Next time you hear someone knock twice at your door, consider: did your experience of the first knock itself last longer or shorter than your experience of the second knock? Again, I predict that you will be able to answer knowledgably and without difficulty. (Phillips 2014a, 144)

Phillips’ examples show that we can often easily answer questions about—and perhaps

have knowledge of—the temporal relations among our experiences. But I will argue that

this is not a problem for the strong version of the temporal transparency thesis. The thesis

does not rule out that we have knowledge of the temporal order among our experiences,

but only that we acquire such knowledge in a particular way.

Knowledge of the temporal characteristics of perceptual experience might

sometimes be a product of inferences from general knowledge about what it takes to

perceive something and knowledge about regularities in the world. For example, I know

that my visual and auditory experiences of the kettle boiling occurred before my

gustatory experience of the coffee’s flavour. One way I might know this is because I know

that in order to perceptually experience the coffee, it must (ordinarily) currently be in

causal contact with my sensory receptors—and I know that for the coffee to exist, the

kettle has to boil first. Perhaps sometimes our knowledge of how our experiences are

temporally related is a result of such inferences. But it seems implausible that we must

acquire such knowledge in this sort of way, and that it always depends on our knowledge

of worldly regularities. In Phillips’ case, it does not seem that you would have to infer

95

that you experienced the amber light first from your prior knowledge that traffic lights

turn amber before turning red.

Consider another case: I hear the kettle begin to whistle, and so I look at it and see

water dripping from the spout (perhaps all within the span of just a second or two).

Suppose that I cannot rely here on any background knowledge about regularities

between the kettle whistling and the kettle dripping, and that as far as I know either event

could have occurred first. Nonetheless, it seems to me that in such cases I can tell

something not just about the temporal order of some external events (the kettle made a

noise and then I looked at it) but also about the temporal order among my experiences:

that I had an auditory experience of the whistling before my visual experience of the

dripping. How can the proponent of strong temporal transparency explain this? They can

claim that in this case it seems to me that my attention was drawn by the kettle’s

whistling, which caused me to shift my gaze towards it, in turn causing the visual

experience of the dripping. What gives me the impression that I can know the order

among these experiences (without relying on background knowledge about external

regularities) is my impression of a change in my attentional state causing me to move my

body, and my sense of how these changes seem to be correlated with changes in my

experience.

In general, when we are perceiving we have not only perceptual experiences but

also experiences of directing our attention and of forming judgments about what we

perceive. We have the impression of perceptual experience changing in response to shifts

in attention and our bodily movements, and we have the impression of our epistemic

state changing in response to the things we experience. These mental occurrences—of

directing attention, of moving our bodies or of forming perceptual judgments—are

temporally opaque. Thus, even if perceptual experience itself is temporally transparent

96

in the strong sense, where it is not possible to directly attend to its own temporal

structure, it will nonetheless seem to us that we can learn a great deal about the temporal

structure of perceptual experience by noticing the temporal structure of the stream of

non-perceptual, temporally opaque mental activity that seems to interact with our

experiences in predictable ways.

This account can partially vindicate the intuitions expressed in Phillips’ and

Soteriou’s remarks about temporal transparency. Recall that Phillips claims that when we

reflect on our experience, it is somehow part of the overall phenomenology of the

perceptual experience that it seems to us that we can rationally judge that the temporal

structure of experience mirrors the temporal structure of the events we experience.

Moreover, Phillips claims that this is part of how experience seems on phenomenological

reflection rather than a conclusion of any kind of philosophical theorizing about

experience. In contrast, according to the view I am arguing for, perceptual experience is

temporally transparent in the sense that the temporal location of one’s perceptual

experience is not a directly introspectable feature of perceptual phenomenology. But

when we introspect while perceiving, we nonetheless become aware of two sorts of

events: the (apparently) external events we experience, and non-perceptual, temporally

opaque mental events that accompany our perceptual experiences. Moreover, we seem

to be aware of temporal correlations between changes in the external world and changes

in our epistemic, motivational or attentional states. Since we think of our experiences as

causal inputs to (or at least preconditions for) these sorts of changes, we come to think of

our experiences as temporally matching the experienced changes in the world. As Phillips

says, in becoming aware of our experiences and their temporal features in this way, we

cannot directly focus our attention on the temporal features of our experiences

themselves, and instead must focus on the temporal features of the events we experience.

97

And he is correct that in many cases, the judgments we make about experience’s temporal

structure via this indirect method will be knowledgeable and effortless. So, although the

temporal locations of and temporal relations among perceptual experiences are not

directly accessible to introspection, they do not seem to us to be entirely inaccessible

either: rather, they are indirectly accessible. In perceiving the world, we seem to

effortlessly and automatically learn a great deal about the temporal organization of our

perceptual experiences, but without their own temporal features seeming to directly

contribute to perceptual phenomenology. Hoerl seems to be correct when he claims that

the phenomenology of perceptually experiencing temporal features does not seem to

involve a temporal point of view from which we experience them. But this does not imply

that we are completely in the dark about when, and in what order, our experiences occur.

This distinction, between direct and indirect introspective accessibility, can

explain why the controversy I have been discussing about temporal transparency exists,

but no similar controversy exists concerning the transparency of other features like shape

(transparency is not uncontroversial in these other cases, but the controversy over time is

unique). We do not experience mental occurrences in our own minds as spatially related.

Perhaps, insofar as they are simply events in the brain, they are spatially related, but we

do not appear to learn about their spatial relations simply by undergoing them—either

in a direct way (akin to how you know you are visually experiencing a square) or an

indirect way (akin to my explanation of how you know the temporal order among your

experiences). My suggestion is that the difficulties around the question of temporal

transparency arise because of a failure to recognize this distinction between apparently

direct and apparently indirect manners of introspective access, and the fact that what we

can access directly is not the same as what we can access indirectly in the temporal case.

Such difficulties do not arise in the other cases because the distinction is not relevant: for

98

non-temporal features, there is no difference between what one seems to be able to access

directly and indirectly.

This account diverges from Phillips’ in two important respects. First, although I

agree that perceptual experience can seem to match the temporal features of the events

we experience, the kind of seeming at issue is not factive. Phillips wants to use his claim

about how experience seems in conjunction with a principle he calls “Seems ® Is” to

draw a conclusion about how perceptual experience is. In defense of the principle he

writes that

we cannot make sense of the idea that experience systematically seems to one’s rational introspective reflection to possess a certain temporal ordering, when it is not in fact genuinely so ordered. (2010, 183)

Setting aside the question of whether such a principle is true for any sense of seeming, I

think it is clearly false for the sense of seeming involved in the account I have offered.

Temporal features of experience seem to us to match the temporal features of experienced

events, but this seeming is the result of a kind of implicit theorizing about experience: we

think of perceptual experience as an intermediary between worldly events and changes

in our epistemic and motivational states. But we do not have any kind of direct

phenomenological evidence regarding the temporal features of perceptual experience

itself (nor indirect but somehow infallible evidence, as Phillips’ account seems to

suggest). If order among experiences should turn out not to match order among

experienced events, this would not contradict anything immediately given in the

phenomenology of perception. Although it might seem implausible, there is nothing

incoherent about the idea that certain attentional, motoric, and cognitive events might

seem to be caused by (or to be the causes of) certain changes in our perceptual experience

99

without actually being the effects (or causes) of such changes. Consider the two visual

systems hypothesis, which claims that certain behavioural responses to perceptual states

are caused not by conscious perceptual experiences (in the ventral stream) but by

unconscious perceptual representations (in the dorsal stream) (Goodale and Milner 1992).

Or consider Libet’s (1985) famous argument that what seem to be consciously controlled

reactions to a stimulus actually precede conscious awareness of it. I do not mean to

endorse these claims here. But the fact that we can make sense of them shows that the

kind of infallibility Phillips’ claims for his method of ‘rational’ introspection does not exist

for my indirect account. Our awareness of the timing of non-perceptual mental events

might be a poor measure of the timing of conscious perceptual experiences. Thus, we can

make sense of how experience might seem to possess a certain temporal structure that it

does not have. On my view, Phillips’ Seems ® Is principle does not apply to our

judgments about how experience seems temporally.

A second point of divergence is that on this view, we should be dubious about

whether the temporal order among experiences even seems to match the temporal order

among experienced events perfectly. Over very brief intervals our capacity to discern

changes in our non-perceptual states might be too temporally imprecise to address the

matching question. When I see a red and a green flash that are 50 milliseconds apart, I

might clearly be able to tell that the red flash came first without being able to clearly

identify a temporally coinciding change in my non-perceptual state: I might not be able

to identify any discrete episodes of judging, directing attention, remembering, or

imagining that clearly seemed to occur between the flashes. Moreover, on this account, to

notice such a match we must divide our attention between perceiving the world and

monitoring our own non-perceptual states. Phillips and Soteriou seem to agree that

100

temporal features of experience seem to become introspectively accessible simply by

focusing our attention on the events we seem to perceive, but according to my view this

is not so. Such features seem to become knowable only when our attention is split in a

peculiar way, between the world and our own mental activity.

Comparing the temporal features of our own cognitive states with those of worldly

events we seem to perceive might seem increasingly difficult as the timescale becomes

smaller. Attention is a limited resource, and certain empirical results suggest that its

limitations can affect our sensitivity to temporal phenomena. For example, psychologists

have found that demands on attention and working memory can systematically distort

judgments about temporal duration (see Block et al. 2010 for a meta-analysis) or about

temporal order (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin 1990). Moreover, different kinds of timing tasks

can interfere with one another: when subjects are asked to estimate the duration of stimuli

and to report their temporal order, performance on both tasks worsens (Brown and Smith-

Petersen 2014). More research would be needed to specifically address whether tasks

involving reporting on the temporal features of one’s own mental activity interfere with

externally-directed timing tasks. However, given the prevalence of such interference

effects in related tasks, the hypothesis that such interference would occur seems

reasonable.

3.4 Concluding Remarks

The proponent of strong temporal transparency should admit that we seem to be

aware of a rough match between the timing of our perceptual experiences and the timing

of the events we seem to perceive. As far as we can tell, using our non-perceptual mental

101

activity as an indirect measure of the timing of our experiences, there are no apparent

counterexamples to the matching thesis. But this is not to say that the matching thesis

seems to be true at all timescales. Near the threshold of our capacity to perceptually

discriminate temporal order, it may be impossible to discern changes in our epistemic

states that could provide a relevant measure. And even if we could discern such changes,

it may be impossible to compare them to the timing of experienced external events

because of limitations on attentional resources. Since the debate over the matching thesis

is a debate about experiential temporal structure over sub-second intervals, these

limitations matter. My prediction is that if you try to introspectively assess whether the

matching thesis is correct over such brief intervals, one of two things will occur. Your

attention might land on the external events you seem to perceive and their temporal

features, and you will fail to directly detect anything about the temporal location of your

experience itself. Or you might struggle to discern anything relevant about the temporal

location of your experience, because you cannot identify discrete stages in your epistemic

state corresponding to the worldly changes you experience.

Moreover, I have argued that even if the matching thesis did seem to be true over

such brief timescales, the relevant sense of ‘seeming’ is not one which would guarantee

the conclusion that the thesis is actually true. One would need to show that things are as

they seem in this case, and this would require an argument for the general reliability of

the indirect method I have described. Thus, on my view, there can be no straightforward

phenomenological argument for the matching thesis. To assess whether experience

matches the temporal structure of experienced events, we need to look beyond

introspection.

102

Chapter 4

Perception, Action, and the Present

In the previous chapter I began building a case that despite how things might

seem, theories of temporal perception that deny the matching thesis are compatible with

what we can tell about temporal phenomenology introspectively. One of my overarching

aims is to show that the matching thesis cannot be affirmed on phenomenological

grounds alone. I have argued that although we have a capacity for (indirectly)

introspecting the temporal organization of our experiences, introspective evidence is

insufficient to show that the matching thesis holds up over very brief intervals.

But the intuitive case for matching cannot be dismissed quite so easily. A problem

remains, which is to show how such theories can explain why perceptual experiences

seem to be directed towards the temporal present. The events we perceptually experience

appear to occur in the present. Call this feature of experience phenomenal temporal presence.

Why is it a problem for anti-matching theories? The basic idea (to be spelled out in more

detail later) is that we sometimes have perceptual experiences of multiple events as non-

simultaneous, or as temporally ordered. And if the matching thesis is false, then (at least

sometimes) the experience itself presents the events simultaneously. That is, it does not

have earlier parts presenting the earlier events and later parts presenting the later ones.

But how could a perceptual experience simultaneously present a set of events as non-

simultaneous while also presenting each event as being temporally present? How can

some unit of time appear to us as the temporal present, but also appear to contain

temporal order and change (Le Poidevin 2007, 87)?

103

Another way phenomenal temporal presence poses a problem for anti-matching

theories emerges from the view defended in the previous chapter. There, I argued that

perceptual experience is temporally transparent, in the sense that the temporal features

of our perceptual experiences themselves do not constitute any part of what we are

directly aware of in having perceptual experiences. In particular, we are not aware of the

temporal presence of our perceptual experiences. But if that is correct, how could

perceptual experiences have phenomenal temporal presence? For an experienced event

to appear to be temporally present, wouldn’t we have to experience it as occurring at the

same time as our experience of it? And therefore, wouldn’t we have to directly experience

at least one temporal feature of our experience itself, namely, it’s simultaneity with the

event it presents (Kriegel 2009b)?

The next two chapters aim to meet these challenges. This chapter offers a theory

of the phenomenal temporal presence of perceptual experience. Here, I will temporarily

set aside issues about the matching thesis and introduce my theory of the connection

between perceptual experience and the temporal present. Then in Chapter 5 I will argue

that my theory allows us to dissolve the intuitive challenge to the anti-matching view.

Once we have adopted the correct view of phenomenal temporal presence, we can see

that it does not conflict with the anti-matching theory and is compatible with temporal

transparency.

4.1 Phenomenal Temporal Presence

Consider the phenomenological differences between visually experiencing your

childhood home, visually imagining it and episodically remembering a case where you

104

saw it. Of course, there are many differences we might focus on. Memory and

imagination seem to be less ‘vivid’ than perceptual experiences, although people differ

markedly in their self-reports of how phenomenologically similar visually imagining a

scene is to actually seeing it.52 And visually experiencing seems effortless and automatic

in a way that remembering or imagining does not. But I want to set aside these differences

and focus on an apparently temporal difference. These experiences differ in the periods

of time they seem to concern. All of them seem to occur in the present, but they appear

to disclose different periods of time. Perceptual experience seems to reveal your house as

it is in the present.53 If you have a visual experience of the door opening, it seems to be

opening now. This is not so for episodic memory or perceptual imagination.54

52 See McKelvie (1995), discussed in Schwitzgebel (2002; 2011). 53 Are there counterexamples to the claim that perceptual experience is present-oriented? In déjà vu, one seems to be aware of a perceived event as having occurred in the past, in some sense (see, e.g., Brown 2004). But the event also appears to be occurring presently. I think that déjà vu is most aptly described as involving a feeling of familiarity, or an illusory metacognitive feeling that one remembers a situation just like the one being perceived, rather than as a case where perceptual experience seems genuinely past-oriented (in the same way it ordinarily seems present-oriented). 54 Some philosophers (e.g., Tye 1991; Kind 2001; Nanay 2010; 2012) dispute the claim that perceptual experience is always strongly dissimilar from mental imagery in its phenomenal character because they take it to be refuted by the Perky effect (Perky 1910). Perky asked subjects to look at a surface while visualizing objects from a certain set. Unknown to the subjects, she simultaneously projected faint images of objects from that set on the surface. Surprisingly, subjects thought they were visualizing rather than perceiving the projected objects, and the particular objects they claimed to be visualizing matched those that were projected. Philosophers commonly claim that these findings show that subjects can confuse visual perception and visual imagination, and that they are perhaps inherently indistinguishable. This would contradict the claim that perceptual experience carries a distinctive phenomenological orientation towards the present. But Hopkins (2012) argues that this interpretation of Perky’s experiments is not usually accepted outside of philosophy. More recent work in psychology suggests that the effect reflects the influence of mental imagery on perceptual detection thresholds as well as the influence of unconscious percepts on imagination (see, e.g., Segal and Fusella 1970, discussed in Hopkins 2012). The claim that imagery interferes with perceptual detection and that visual stimuli can influence what one imagines without being consciously detected is no threat to the idea that perceptual experience and imagination are inherently distinguishable. And even if subjects truly mistook a visual experience for an imaginative one, this would not by itself show that there are not inherent phenomenological differences between perception and imagination. The possibility of mistaking one mental state for another in special circumstances need not imply that they lack intrinsic characteristics that distinguish them.

105

Episodically remembering your door opening seems to involve being aware of the door

opening in the past, and imagining the door opening seems not to concern its opening at

any time in particular.55

On my terminology, these experiences differ in that only perceptual experiences

have phenomenal temporal presence. An experience has phenomenal temporal presence

if and only if it is an experience that seems to disclose how things are in the temporal

present. This is different from an experience itself seeming to occur in the present. The

experience of recalling or imagining an event will seem to occur in the present as well,

but the events recalled or imagined will not. Phenomenal temporal presence is a matter

of an experience being oriented towards the present, rather than it apparently being located

in the present. And the fact that perceptual experiences are apparently located in the

present is insufficient to explain why they have phenomenal temporal presence, since

some mental states that lack it seem to be located in the present.

What is the nature of this connection between perceptual experience and the

temporal present? I think that Le Poidevin is correct when he writes that it “is not clear

[…] that there is an interesting difference between perceiving something ‘as present’ and

simply perceiving it” (2007, 77). In other words, part of the nature of perceptual

experiences—part of what makes them perceptual—is that they are apparently oriented

towards the present. On my view, this is not an analytic truth about the term ‘perceptual

experience’ but rather a claim about the natural unity within the category of perceptual

55 One can try to imagine how things are now, or how they were or will be. So there is a sense in which the things we imagine can seem to concern a particular time. But even when we stipulate to ourselves that we are imagining how things are presently, the imaginative experience does not seem present-directed in quite the same way as perceptual experience, since it seems to depend on our interpretation of the imaginative episode rather than a feeling intrinsic it.

106

experiences. Being oriented towards the present is part of what unifies perceptual

experiences as a natural mental kind. But we ought to ask why this feature is so closely

tied to the nature of perception. The view I will defend offers a simple explanation:

phenomenal temporal presence is characteristic of perceptual experiences because it is

constituted by a certain psychological functional role, and that role is characteristic of

perceptual experiences.

How, then, is phenomenal temporal presence connected to the functional role of

perceptual experience? The theory I will offer starts with two intuitive claims: one

connecting perceptual experience with our capacity for actions of a certain kind, and

another connecting the possibility of such actions with the temporal present:

(1) Perceptual experience has a special role to play in enabling certain actions.56

(2) We implicitly recognize (in a sense to be explained) that performing these actions requires that the experiences guiding them concern how things are presently.

These claims offer a glimpse of the idea behind the theory. Perceptual experiences are

characterized by a certain feeling corresponding to their distinctive role in guiding action.

And, because of our understanding of the temporal conditions necessary for that role to

be played successfully, we are apt to describe that feeling as an orientation towards the

56 The view I defend is partly inspired by Matthen’s (2005, 2010b) proposal that the feeling of presence (of an object really being there), which distinguishes perceptual experience from imagination or memory, is contributed by the ‘motion-guiding vision’ system, which enables visually guided action. My proposal, which is compatible with although not implied by Matthen’s, is that a similar account can be extended to explain the feeling of temporal presence. I remain neutral on questions about how, exactly, to characterize the motion-guiding visual system or how it is related to conscious vision. I also intend to extend the proposal beyond vision to the other senses.

107

temporal present.57 This is not to say that the character of the feeling depends on how we

describe it. The feeling corresponds to the action-guiding role of perceptual experiences,

and its character is not sensitive to how we are disposed to think about it. But we can be

expected to conceive of it as a feeling of temporal presence because of the connection that

we implicitly recognize between perceptually guided action and the temporal present.

Call this the action guidance theory of phenomenal temporal presence.

The challenge for the theory is to move beyond this sketch, and to explain with

more clarity and precision what these claims mean, why we should accept them, and how

they amount to a theory of the phenomenal temporal presence of perception. I aim to do

so in the next two sections. Then, in Section 4.4, I respond to two important objections to

my proposal. The first is the objection that phenomenal temporal presence cannot be

linked to action guidance in the way I suggest because certain subjects have deficits of

perceptually guided action (e.g., subjects with locked-in syndrome) but evidently still have

perceptual experiences that are oriented towards the present. The second is the objection

that phenomenal characteristics of mental states cannot be constituted by their functional

roles for reasons having to do with the distinction between occurrent and dispositional

properties.

57 I want to remain neutral at this point on the nature of the temporal present as it appears in perceptual experience. As we shall see, my view is that we do not perceptually experience events as occurring exactly in the metaphysical present moment, as conceived on either the A-theory or the B-theory of time. This distinction will become clear in Chapter 5 where I discuss alternative accounts of phenomenal temporal presence.

108

4.2 The Role of Perceptual Experience in Guiding Action

An immediate challenge for the action guidance theory of phenomenal temporal

presence is that perceptual experience is not the only kind of mental state that guides

actions. Memories and acts of imagination can as well. My memory of where I parked

helps to guide me back to my car. And my imagination can help me to determine how

things might have changed while I was not perceiving them. For example, I can imagine

the trajectory of the baseball as it passed over the fence and out of sight, and this helps

me decide where to look for it. And as we have seen, memories and imagination lack

phenomenal temporal presence. Moreover, other mental states help to determine how we

act: our background beliefs or knowledge, our motivational states, and so on. Thus,

having some role or other in guiding action cannot be sufficient to explain phenomenal

temporal presence.

Nonetheless, perceptual experience seems to have a unique role to play in guiding

action. I will illustrate this role by considering the phenomenological differences between

the following kinds of cases.

• Reaching for your coffee cup while you are visually experiencing it.

• Reaching for your coffee cup while blindfolded, while you can remember where you last saw it.

• Reaching for the coffee cup while blindfolded, while you cannot remember where you saw it, but someone has described its (egocentric) location to you.

Here is a rough, initial attempt at characterizing the difference. While you are visually

experiencing the cup, you can use its apparent location as a target for your action. You

can simply reach for it where you experience it as being located. In doing so, you seem to

109

focus your attention on the cup’s location, and simply move your hand there. When you

visually experience the cup’s location, it seems to be available to you as a target for

reaching in this sense.

When you merely remember the cup’s location, you can again reach for it where

it seems to be (i.e., where you remember it to be). But its apparent location no longer

seems to be available to you as a target for reaching in the same way. You can think about

its location insofar as you can remember it, and you can attempt to move your hand there,

but it does not seem that the apparent location is available to guide your hand in the same

way. While you are blindfolded, you might focus on a location in peripersonal space (the

space immediately surrounding your body) where you last saw the cup, and focus on

moving your hand there.58 But this is not the same as having a perceptual link to the cup

and its location. Your sense of peripersonal space might allow you to single out a location

which happens to be the location of a particular object (and perhaps you can remember

it as the location of the object from when you could see it), but it does not seem to allow

you to single out that location as the object’s location (in the de dicto sense), or to use your

link to the object to directly guide your reaching.

Much the same can be said for the case where you know the cup’s location by

testimony. Someone might give you a perfect description of the cup’s egocentric position:

its exact distance and direction from your body. And yet this information does not seem

to be available to guide your reach in the same way as when you acquire that information

perceptually.

58 On the relationship between peripersonal space and action, see Jackson (2014).

110

The cases differ in how we are inclined to or capable of using the experiences in

guiding our actions. That is, they differ in the psychological functional role the

experiences play. This difference might be closely connected to other special roles that

have been attributed to perceptual experience: its epistemic role in justifying our

perceptual beliefs (e.g., Pryor 2000; Smithies 2014; 2019), or in enabling us to think

singular demonstrative thoughts about objects (e.g., Campbell 2002; Dickie 2011; 2016).

But I want to set aside these questions of epistemology to focus on the psychological and

phenomenological differences between these cases.

What, then, is the functional role that your perceptual experience of the cup plays,

which your memory or imagination of it does not? The role is one of setting targets for

the direct control of action.59 The role is ‘direct’ in at least two different senses. In the first

sense, it is direct because we ordinarily take perceptual experiences to settle how things

are in the environment for the purposes of action. When we perceptually experience an

object and we want to act upon it, we are normally not inclined to draw conscious

inferences about the object’s location based on our experience, weighing how things

appear perceptually against other considerations. In contrast, we do not take memory

and imagination to settle questions about how things are in the same way. This is not to

say that we do not often (or even usually) uncritically rely on memory to inform our

actions. But we treat our memories as a defeasible source of information for action

guidance, in the sense that new information can always potentially supersede what we

remember, and it can do so without us coming to think that the memory is in any way

59 This claim draws a relatively weak connection between perception and action. It is compatible with, but does not imply, stronger claims, such as that of Evans (1985) or Grush (2007), who argue that the content of perception (and in particular, the spatial content) constitutively depends on causal/dispositional connections between perception and action.

111

faulty. Simply put, we act as though things can change since we have observed them,

even if we often assume that they have not.

This is not to say that we never distrust our perceptual experiences either. Claims

about the functional roles of mental states are not meant to be exceptionless

generalizations about their causes and effects, but rather claims about their causal

tendencies, which can nonetheless characterize them as the kinds of mental states they

are. We might suspect that we are suffering from an illusion or hallucination. But in such

cases, it seems that it would nonetheless feel natural to treat the perceptual experience as

settling how things are and to act as if the experience were veridical. Imagine a case where

you know that you are hallucinating a coffee cup in a location one foot to the left of where

your actual coffee cup is. Even knowing this, it seems that it would feel difficult to

suspend your reliance on the perceptual experience and to instead reach for the cup

where you know it to be.60 A natural explanation for the feeling of difficulty is that in this

case you are preventing your perceptual experience from playing the action-guiding role

that it ordinarily plays.

By contrast, it would not feel as unnatural or difficult to reach for the coffee cup at

a location other than where you remember or imagine it to be when you have reason to

think it has moved from there—especially if your reason is that you also have a

perceptual experience of it being in a different location. And the absence (or comparative

60 Subjects can adapt their behaviour to this kind of visual displacement. See Welch (1978) for a review of experiments involving prism-induced displacement of vision. Supposing that such adaptation preserves the feeling that objects are available as targets for action despite the objects still appearing displaced in conscious vision, I would suggest that these cases involve a dissociation between the two kinds of ‘directness’ I discuss. The displaced visual experiences do not ‘settle’ how things are for the purposes of action-planning, but they do provide targets that can be consciously selected for the direct (perhaps unconscious) control and implementation of action.

112

reduction) of such a feeling seems to reflect the fact that we are not inclined to allow

memories and acts of imagination to settle our action-guiding representations in the same

way perceptual experiences do; we treat them as one source of evidence to be potentially

weighed against others.

Thus, the first way in which perceptual experience seems to guide action ‘directly’

is the sense in which we take it to settle how things are for the purposes of action (and

that when we are knowingly suffering from a non-veridical perceptual experience, we

must deliberately prevent the experience from playing this role). The second is the sense

in which perceptual experience seems to make targets available to be selected for exerting

a kind of direct control over the implementation of action. This claim is closely related to

certain proposals in the literature relating perception and action. For example, Wu (2011;

2014) argues that attention (including perceptual attention) is selection for action. He

spells out this identity claim using the notion of an abstract behavioural space, in which all

possible inputs (e.g., the items I visually experience before me: my phone, a cup, a book,

etc.) are connected to all possible behavioural outputs (i.e., all of the actions I could take

with respect to one of the objects: reaching for it, pushing it, pointing to it, orienting

towards it, etc.). At any time, there are many possible combinations. According to Wu, to

attend to an object is to select a ‘path’ through this abstract behavioural space: to ‘couple’

an input with an output (e.g., to couple the input of the book with the output of reaching).

An implication of Wu’s claim is that whenever you perceptually attend to an object, you

select it to guide some action. If his proposal is correct, my thesis in this section can be

understood as the claim that everything we perceptually experience seems to be a

potential object of perceptual attention (i.e., a potential input to be coupled with some

action as an output). This seems plausible, and many philosophers have tried to draw

even stronger connections between perceptual attention and perceptual experience (e.g.,

113

Prinz 2011; 2012). That said, the arguments of this chapter do not depend on the

metaphysics of attention. The notion that perceptual experience makes objects available

for coupling with actions is plausible enough on its own, regardless of how one conceives

of the relationship between attention and perceptually guided action.

When we select a perceptually experienced object to guide an action, we seem to

allow the object to influence the implementation of the action without consciously

monitoring all of the implementation details. This is to say that conscious perceptual

experience seems to conform to what Clark calls the “Hypothesis of Experience-Based

Selection”: the idea that experiences present their objects in a form appropriate for the

selection of action (2001, 512). They may not present them in a form appropriate for the

conscious control of the fine motor details of action, what Clark calls the “Assumption of

Experience-based Control” (496). When we visually experience objects, they seem to be

available for action in the sense that we can seemingly allow them to exert influence over

how we move, without us consciously overseeing the details of how that influence takes

shape.61 This seems to capture part of the meaning behind the intuitive claim that when

you visually experience the cup, the experience allows you to reach for it where it appears

to be, in a way that having information about its position from other sources would not.

For example, when I reach for the coffee cup, it seems that I can use its apparent visual

location to ‘fill in’ the motor programming details of how to grasp it. Decisions about

61 This fits well with social psychologists’ conception of the relationship between the conscious selection of goals and the sometimes unconscious selection of means of attaining them. As Moskowitz et al. put it, “a goal can be consciously selected but trigger implicit processes regulating movement toward successfully attaining the goal” (2004, 324).

114

exactly how to contract the muscles of my arm are handled unconsciously, but I can

consciously influence them by selecting something I visually experience as a target.62

Distinguishing conscious selection from conscious control allows us to answer a

possible objection to my proposal. One might think a view which posits a tight connection

between perceptual experience and action is challenged by certain experimental results.

For example, certain size-contrast illusions affect subjects’ explicit judgments about the

relative sizes of objects, but not the way subjects act with respect to those objects. In a

three-dimensional version of the Ebbinghaus illusion, subjects are presented with two

circles of the same size, where one is surrounded by larger circles and the other is

surrounded by smaller circles (Agliotti et al. 1995). Subjects consistently judge that the

one surrounded by the larger circles is smaller. But if asked to grasp each circle, the size

of the grasping gesture they make is not significantly different for either circle. It appears

that the illusion strongly affects the conscious visual experience of the circles, but not

subjects’ actions with respect to them. Proponents of the two visual systems hypothesis

(TVSH) take results like this to show that there are two distinct visual systems, one

specialized for conscious perception (in the ventral stream) and one specialized for

guiding bodily action (in the dorsal stream) (Goodale and Milner 1992; 2004; Milner and

Goodale 2006; 2008).

However, TVSH does not require us to give up on the claim that conscious

perceptual experience plays the target-setting role I have described. In Clark’s terms, the

62 Can I do the same with imagination? Consider a case where I close my eyes and try to focus on a location in peripersonal space. It seems that I might use my awareness of that location to select it to ‘fill in’ the implementation details for an action (e.g., reaching for it) in much the same way as I could do if I had my eyes open and could see that location. But this does not show that perceptual experience lacks a special role in action-planning. Perception allows for experienced objects to control our actions (rather than locations in peripersonal space).

115

view challenges the Assumption of Experience-based Control, not the Hypothesis of

Experience-based Selection. The 3D Ebbinghaus experiments do not conflict with the idea

that conscious vision plays a role in selecting targets for action, but rather the claim that

conscious vision is involved in programming the fine motor details of action.63 What is

in dispute is whether conscious vision does (or even can) play the role of determining the

fine motor programming of actions (e.g., of setting the precise grip aperture for grasping

the circles), not whether conscious vision presents targets for the selection of action.64

And TVSH is consistent with perceptual experience ‘directly’ guiding action in the

second sense I identified, since it allows us to select targets for the direct control of certain

aspects of our behaviour (i.e., control not guided by online conscious feedback) .

So far, I have argued that we are disposed to treat perceptual experiences in a

special way with respect to action guidance. We ordinarily allow them to directly guide

our actions. But, supposing this much is correct, what follows about perceptual

phenomenology? Someone might agree that perceptual experiences play this functional

role but suggest that their doing so makes no difference to what it’s like to have

63 For arguments that such experiments do not challenge even the Assumption of Experience-based Control, see Briscoe (2008) and Briscoe and Schwenkler (2015). Note that the view I am defending does not require that this assumption is false. It could be that consciously experienced information can guide the fine motor planning of action (so there is no separate ‘vision for action’ stream of processing, which is inaccessible to consciousness) although it often does not, and it is possible to offload the detailed motor programming to unconscious processing (even though the information used for such planning is always consciously accessible). 64 A similar response can address the charge that perceptual experience is not action guiding because visual form agnosia (a deficit in the capacity to visually recognize objects) and optic ataxia (a deficit in the ability to perform visually guided manual actions) are doubly dissociable (Milner and Goodale 2006). My claim is not that conscious perception is always involved in the ongoing performance of visually guided actions. Rather, it is that conscious perception can set targets for such actions, even if online feedback and monitoring of the action does not rely on conscious perceptual information. Thus, it is compatible with the possibility that deficits in performance are not accompanied by deficits in conscious perception, or vice versa. But see Rosetti et al. (2003) and Pisella et al. (2006) for evidence against these conditions being doubly dissociable.

116

perceptual experiences. If the functional role is not reflected in perceptual

phenomenology, it could not help to explain phenomenal temporal presence. Is this

suggestion correct? Try to imagine a person who had conscious experiences as similar as

possible to those you have while perceiving but who had no inclination whatsoever to

use those experiences to directly guide their actions (in the senses I have identified).65

That is, they would have no inclination to take perceptual appearances to settle how

things are for the purposes of acting, and they would never use perceptual experiences

to select targets for the control of actions like reaching, moving, or orienting. For them,

having a visual experience of the coffee cup would be no more significant with respect to

action planning than would hearing about its location from a friend, or remembering its

location from an earlier observation. Would there be a difference between you and such

a person with respect to what it’s like to experience your coffee cup on the table? It seems

to me that there would be a difference. We could not have perceptual experiences that

were phenomenally identical to our actual experiences without treating them as

providing potential targets for actions. Moreover, it is unclear that the experiences of such

a person deserve to be called ‘perceptual’. On my view, the role I have described is part

of what unifies perceptual experiences as a natural psychological kind. One might choose

to use the term ‘perceptual experience’ in some other way, on which this functional role

is not a necessary feature, and which would include cases like that in the thought

experiment above. But this does not undermine the point that this functional role seems

65 One might worry here that people with locked-in syndrome fit this description but still have ordinary perceptual experiences. I will discuss this objection in Section 4.4. To preview what I say there, I do not think that locked-in subjects are entirely incapable of perceptually guided action; even ‘completely’ locked-in subjects are still capable of performing mental (rather than bodily) actions. Therefore, I do not think that they meet the description of a subject who has no inclination whatsoever to use their perceptual experience to guide their actions.

117

to be constitutive of a theoretically significant class of mental states, closely related to

ordinary uses of the word ‘perceptual’. To paraphrase Le Poidevin’s remark that I quoted

in the first section, it is not clear that there is an interesting difference between consciously

perceiving something while experiencing it as an opportunity for action and simply

perceptually experiencing it.

4.3 The Connection Between Action Guidance and the Present

I have argued that there is a phenomenological feature of perceptual experience

corresponding to its functional role in directly guiding actions. But note that I have not

yet characterized this phenomenological feature or the functional role it corresponds to

in temporal terms. I have not yet said anything about experiencing events as present. This

might come as a surprise. One might assume that a theory of phenomenal temporal

presence would begin by characterizing it as the phenomenological feature in virtue of

which we are able to use experiences to guide actions—that we can act on what we

experience because we experience it as temporally present.66 My theory reverses this

expected order of explanation. Instead of trying to explain our capacity for perceptually

guided action in terms of the appearance of events as being present, I suggest that we

explain the appearance of presence in terms of perception’s action guiding role. On my

view, we do not need to appeal to phenomenal temporal presence to explain how

perceptual experiences can guide actions. And, because of our implicit understanding of

66 For example, Rashbrook-Cooper characterizes phenomenal temporal presence as a feature of experience that “renders actions and now-judgements immediately appropriate” (2017, 135).

118

the connection between the temporal present and the possibility of perceptually guided

action, we can explain phenomenal temporal presence in terms of the action guiding role

of perception.

To set the stage for the kind of theory I am suggesting, consider the following

analogy. Suppose that you own stocks in your friend’s company, and he tells you to sell

them. Taken literally, his message is not a description of what is going to happen at any

particular time but rather an instruction to do something. But because of you and your

friend’s background understanding, you can recognize that his instruction implicitly

carries descriptive temporal information: that the stocks will fall in price soon. You can

understand this, because you and your friend share a joint understanding of your goal in

investing in his company: you want to make (or avoid losing) as much money as possible.

So, when your friend presents to you a signal to do something in this context, you

understand the signal as having the function of getting you to act in a way that will help

you achieve that goal. And because you know that the instructed action would help you

to achieve your goal only if certain conditions were met, you can also understand the

signal as implicating (without explicitly representing) that those conditions are indeed

met.

I think that we can explain phenomenal temporal presence in a roughly similar

way. We do not need to think of perceptual experiences as explicitly presenting events as

occurring in the temporal present.67 This claim can be spelled out in different ways,

depending on one’s theory of perceptual phenomenal character. For the

67 Here, I agree with Hoerl (2009, 2018), who argues that perceptual experience is untensed. Grush (2016) also argues that perceptual experience does not involve tensed notions like ‘present,’ at least within brief intervals (around 200 milliseconds). I discuss Grush’s view in more depth in Chapter 5.

119

representationalist, it means that perceptual experiences do not represent the property of

temporal presence, and that their contents are not present-tensed. For the naive realist, it

means that temporal presence is not a property that partly constitutes perceptual

phenomenal character. For indirect theorists, it means that there are no sense-data (or

mental paint, or qualia) corresponding to the property of temporal presence.68 But

perceptual experiences are characterized by a feeling of being poised for the direct

guidance of action. And we implicitly understand that for such experiences to play their

action guiding role reliably in environments like ours, the events they present would

have to occur approximately in the temporal present (I will say more about the

qualification of ‘approximately’ shortly). Because of this implicit understanding, we are

apt to describe the feeling corresponding to perception’s action guiding role as a feeling

of being oriented towards the temporal present.

Although the theory involves post-perceptual mental states (namely, our implicit

understanding of the temporal present and its relationship with perceptually guided

action), it does not claim that phenomenal temporal presence is part of post-perceptual

phenomenology. Rather, it is the element corresponding to the action guiding role of

perceptual experience. But acknowledging that element as a kind of temporal orientation

requires one to appreciate the connection between action guidance and the temporal

present. Creatures incapable of thinking about the present in the way we do might

experience the very same feeling, but without the temporal significance that it has for us.

68 In Chapter 5 I will directly address these alternative views, on which temporal presence is a property that we perceptually experience.

120

The theory invokes our understanding of the present, and its connection to action,

but it does not attempt to explain how we acquire the concept of temporal presence. Nor

does it attempt to give an analysis of that concept. What the theory requires is that we

implicitly think of the present as the time during which it is possible to act on our

surroundings in certain ways. Our reasoning about perceptually guided action seems to

involve the implicit acceptance of the following principle:

Action coordination principle: For a subject to reliably perform a perceptually guided action (e.g., grasping, pushing, pointing, etc.) on some object o, where the action is guided by a perceptual experience of o’s being F, o must be F at (approximately) the same time the subject experiences it as F.

Here are some examples to illustrate what the principle says. For someone to grasp their

cup, guided by a perceptual experience of it being in some place, the cup must be in that

place when they have the experience of it.69 For someone to point at an airplane passing

overhead, guided by their experience of it occupying some region, the plane must be in

that region at the time of their experience. Here is a non-spatial example: for someone to

begin accelerating at an intersection, guided by their perceptual experience of the

stoplight turning green, the light must turn green at the time of their experience. In each

of these examples, the experience must disclose how things are in the present to reliably

guide the subject’s action. Note that the principle does not require that the subject’s

experience represent o as presently being F. My view is that perceptual experiences make

objects seem to be available as opportunities for action without explicitly representing

69 To put it in more colloquial (if less precise) terms, for someone to grasp their cup where they see it, it must be there when they see it there.

121

them as temporally present. I do not think that this contradicts any principle we employ

in ordinary reasoning about perceptually guided actions.

I claim that we implicitly employ this principle in our reasoning about

perceptually guided actions, but I do not think that it is an analytic truth, in the sense that

it reveals essential features of our concepts of perceptually guided action, or of the

temporal present. How, then, should we understand the status of the principle? I think

that it plays a similar role in our thinking about time and action to that of another

principle that has been closely studied in the developmental literature on temporal

concepts: the temporal priority principle, which says that causes must precede their effects

(see, e.g, Rankin and McCormack 2013). The temporal priority principle seems to underlie

our intuitive causal reasoning, at least after a certain stage in development. But it is not

an analytic truth, revealing essential features of our concepts of causation, or of temporal

relations. Backwards causation might be impossible—perhaps even logically

impossible—but it is not ruled out by our grasp of the concept of causation. After all, we

can make sense of stories about time travel, where a time traveler’s choice to go back in

time is a cause of events in their own past. The temporal priority principle can play this

role in our reasoning despite not being a conceptual truth because it expresses a true

generalization about the causal relations we find in the kinds of environments where we

employ it.

Something similar is true of the action coordination principle. It is not a conceptual

truth that perceptually guided action requires that one’s experience discloses how things

are in the temporal present. The principle is useful because it expresses a truth about the

requirements for perceptually guided action in our ordinary environment. But things

could have been different. To illustrate, consider a case where my perceptual experience

of the world is delayed. Suppose I am here on Earth controlling a robot that is on the

122

moon. I am using a video feed to guide the robot’s movements, but the video feed is

delayed by, say, five seconds.70 And suppose that I practice enough that controlling the

robot begins to feel completely natural. For example, when I see the robot approaching a

group of obstacles, I can effortlessly and automatically manipulate the controls so that

the robot will avoid them, taking the delay into account without conscious effort. The

events displayed might begin to appear to me as opportunities for action, in the same

sense that the events I perceive in my immediate environment do.71 But in this kind of

artificial environment, the action coordination principle does not apply: if an event on the

screen appeared to me as an opportunity for the direct control of action, I would not

thereby think of it as also appearing as temporally present, because I would know that

events on the screen occurred five seconds ago. Thus, there might be cases where the two

ingredients in my account come apart: under certain unusual conditions, an experience

could involve the feeling of availability for action guidance (because of our potential

capacity to adapt to the unusual conditions), but because of our background

understanding of the conditions, we would no longer describe that feeling as one of

temporal presence.

Related to this last point, I should emphasize that the ordinary conditions in which

perceptually guided actions take place do not actually involve strict simultaneity

between events and our experiences of them. The principle ought to be understood in a

way that is consistent with the empirically observed fact that perceptual processes take

70 This example was suggested to me by William Seager. 71 I am supposing this for the sake of argument rather than making a prediction about what would happen in this case.

123

time, and so our perceptual experiences of events are never exactly simultaneous with

them. Our capacity for perceptually guided action depends on a contingent stability in

our environment. We might have found ourselves in environments where things changed

too quickly for perceptually guided action to be possible: where, for example, I could not

grasp, point to, or even focus my attention on an experienced object, because it would

inevitably move too far and too unpredictably during the delay between its occupying

some location and my experience of it being there. But perceptually guided action does

not require perfect stability—things do change during the delays involved in perceptual

processing. This means that we should not interpret the action guidance principle’s claim

that ‘o must be F at the same time the subject experiences it as F’ as requiring that the

event and one’s experience are exactly simultaneous. Approximate simultaneity,

consistent with the actual delays involved in perceptual processes, is good enough for

our ordinary, implicit employment of the action coordination principle.

I have now introduced everything required to spell out my theory of phenomenal

temporal presence. The theory involves a phenomenological claim and a metacognitive

claim. The phenomenological claim is that perceptual phenomenal character partly

consists in a feeling that experienced objects or events are opportunities for the direct

guidance of certain actions (in the two senses I discussed). The kinds of actions in

question are perceptually guided actions. The metacognitive claim is that because our

ordinary reasoning about perceptually guided action involves implicitly employing the

action coordination principle, we can be expected to describe the feeling as a feeling of

being temporally oriented towards the present. We think of perceptually guided action

as requiring the (approximate) temporal presence of the perceptually experienced events

that guide it. And therefore, we think of a feeling of an experienced event’s being

available to guide these actions as a feeling of the event being temporally present.

124

If the theory is viable, we can explain why perceptual experiences seem to be

oriented towards the present without relying on the idea that we perceptually experience

the property of temporal presence in anything like the way we experience other

properties like colour, shape, or spatial location (or even other temporal properties like

order and duration). In the next chapter, I will show how this theory avoids certain

problems faced by its alternatives on which we do perceive temporal presence more

directly. But first I will discuss certain objections to the view that phenomenal temporal

presence consists in the feeling of availability for action guidance.

4.4 Objections to the Action Guidance Theory

Someone might object that there are dissociations between the capacity for

perceptually guided action and the capacity for having experiences characterized by the

feeling of temporal presence. Consider locked-in syndrome, where a person loses all

control over bodily movement except for vertical eye movements and blinking, and

cannot verbally communicate, but is nonetheless conscious and capable of perceiving

(Bauer et al. 1979; Smith and Delargy 2005). Some lose even the ability to move their eyes

(they are ‘completely’ locked-in), and doctors can communicate with them only by using

a brain-computer interface (Chaudhary et al. 2017). If completely locked-in subjects are

conscious and capable of perceiving, they probably have perceptual experiences

characterized by phenomenal temporal presence. Surely there is a felt temporal difference

for them between visually experiencing their childhood home and remembering it. But

their perceptual experiences cannot play the role of directly setting targets for bodily

125

actions because they are not capable of performing such actions. So perhaps phenomenal

temporal presence cannot be related to action guidance in the way I have suggested.

This objection can be resisted in two ways. First, although I have focused on bodily

actions like reaching, grasping, pointing, and shifting one’s bodily orientation, we need

not restrict what the proposal says to bodily actions. Guiding mental actions is part of the

characteristic action guiding role of perception. Just as my visual experience of a bird

flying overhead allows me to shift my head to follow its path, it also allows me to shift

my visual attention to follow it, even when I am keeping my head still. Moreover, forming

demonstrative, present-tensed judgments, such as the judgment that this is red now, can

be considered a kind of mental action. These both count as perceptually guided actions

for my purposes, since they both seem to conform to the action coordination principle:

their successful performance requires that the guiding perceptual experience occurs at

(roughly) the same time as the event that it is an experience of.

Therefore, guiding bodily action is only part of the relevant functional role. Locked-

in subjects capable of attending and forming now-judgments can be expected to have

perceptual experiences characterized by a feeling corresponding to this part of the

functional role (and this feeling is aptly described as a felt orientation towards the

present, for the same reasons the feeling corresponding to availability for bodily actions

can). The action guidance account is thus not committed to the idea that phenomenal

temporal presence requires the capacity for bodily action, and so it is compatible with a

dissociation between them.

The second way the objection can be resisted is by noting that the feeling that

perceptual experience presents objects as potential targets for action is not the same thing

as their actually guiding some action the subject performs. My claim was not that

perceptually experienced events seem to be occurring in the present only when we

126

actually use them to guide actions. Rather, it was that perceptual experiences seem to

make experienced events available as potential targets for certain actions. Would your

experiences cease to feel this way if you lost the capacity to perform such actions? Perhaps

they would, in which case I would fall back on the first response. But this seems to be an

open question, and so the objection is less straightforwardly threatening to the view than

it might have seemed.

Another objection to the action guidance theory comes from the idea that we

should not try to explain aspects of perceptual phenomenology functionally. In other

words, we should not try to explain how some mental state feels in terms of its

characteristic causes and effects.72 One reason for making this claim might be the thought

that the property of having a certain functional role is merely a dispositional property,

while the property of having a certain phenomenal character seems to be a categorical

(i.e., non-dispositional) property.73 Consciousness in general does not seem to be merely

dispositional. And one cannot, on pain of inconsistency, identify a dispositional property

with a categorical property. So perhaps my proposal, which attempts to link phenomenal

temporal presence with a functional property of perceptual mental states, fails, because

it tries to explain a categorical property in terms of a dispositional one.

72 Some functionalist theories of mental states are motivated by the idea that we can reductively explain all mental phenomena including consciousness in physical/functional terms. My claims in this chapter are far less ambitious. We should distinguish the project of explaining why a mental state has the phenomenal character that it does (rather than some other phenomenal character) from the project of explaining why it has any phenomenal character at all (i.e., what Chalmers (1995) calls the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness). It could be that functional properties help to characterize certain phenomenal states as the kind of states they are without explaining why they are conscious states in the first place (i.e., without solving the hard problem). Arguments against functionalism as a reductionist theory of consciousness (e.g., Block’s (1978) ‘homunculi-headed robots’ argument) do not directly address the view I am defending here. 73 For example, Kriegel (2009a) argues against attempts to explain the apparently categorical nature of consciousness in terms of dispositional functional roles.

127

I will answer this objection in two ways. First, although I have sometimes talked

as though perception’s functional role should be identified with phenomenal temporal

presence, their identity is inessential to the action guidance theory. Certain versions of the

view might explain the connection between phenomenal temporal presence and the

function of action guidance in other ways. For example, it could be that one perceptually

experiences objects as opportunities for action guidance. In other words, perceptual

experience might involve awareness of what Gibson (1977) calls affordances.74 On this

version of the view, it would be the perceptual appearance of the affordances, rather than

the functional role of the perceptual state, that should be identified with phenomenal

temporal presence. And there is no special reason to think that the property of presenting

affordances will turn out to be a merely dispositional property of perceptual states (i.e.,

there seems to be no reason to suppose that presenting affordances would be a

dispositional property while presenting, e.g., colours would not).

Or, another version of the theory might say that there is a feeling corresponding

to the dispositional functional role of action guidance and that the feeling should be

identified with the categorical basis of the disposition.75 In other words, there is some

categorical property of perceptual mental states in virtue of which they play the

functional role of guiding action, and phenomenal temporal presence is identical with

that categorical property. They have the disposition to guide actions because they have

74 On the possibility that affordances are part of the representational content of perceptual experience, see Siegel (2014). 75 Similarly, Prinz (2011; 2012) argues that consciousness (and attention) consists in accessibility to central cognitive processes. He considers the objection that accessibility is merely a dispositional property and so could not be identified with consciousness, which is apparently categorical. Prinz’s solution is to explain accessibility to central cognition in terms of a categorical property of mental states. Therefore, accessibility is not really a dispositional property of mental states on his view.

128

that categorical property. Thus, there is no logical problem connecting dispositional

functional roles with categorical phenomenal character, as long as we keep in mind the

distinction between a disposition and its categorical basis and identify phenomenal

character with the latter and not the former.

My second, less conciliatory response to this objection is that while the claim that

phenomenal character is categorical rather than dispositional seems hard to deny for

cases like visual colour experiences, it is less obvious in the case of phenomenal temporal

presence. Perhaps phenomenal temporal presence really is nothing more than a

disposition for a perceptual mental state to affect your other phenomenal states and

behaviours in certain ways. As far as I can tell introspectively, it is not clear that the

feeling of temporal presence is a categorical aspect of perceptual phenomenology rather

than a dispositional one. Even if phenomenology cannot be entirely reduced to functional

roles, this does not imply that certain ‘complex’ aspects of phenomenal character of a

mental state cannot be explained by appealing to its characteristic causes and effects,

since those causes and effects might include other phenomenal states. This kind of

explanation would be implausible for other aspects of perceptual experience, such as

experiences of sensible qualities. For example, it would be implausible to suggest that the

property of visually experiencing red is nothing but a disposition of one’s perceptual state

to affect one’s beliefs and behaviours in certain ways. But phenomenal temporal presence

is radically different in its phenomenology from the experience of sensible qualities like

colours; perhaps they deserve different sorts of explanation. Moreover, the idea that we

should explain phenomenal temporal presence functionally follows naturally from the

idea that phenomenal temporal presence is tied to characteristic features of perceptual

experiences (i.e., the features that make them count as perceptual) plus the idea that the

characteristic features of perceptual mental states are their functional properties. So even

129

if one is skeptical about explaining phenomenology functionally in general, it does not

follow that one should be skeptical about explaining this aspect of phenomenology

functionally.

4.5 Concluding Remarks

I have argued that the action guidance theory can explain phenomenal temporal

presence. Phenomenal temporal presence seems to be an essential, rather than accidental,

feature of perceptual experiences, and the action guidance account respects this

connection by explaining it in terms of the characteristic role perceptual experiences play

in guiding actions. Once we recognize the connection between action and the temporal

present, via the action coordination principle, it is natural to think of the action guiding

role of perception as an orientation towards the present. On this view, there is no need to

think that the temporal present figures into the representational content of perceptual

experience, or more generally, that it is part of what we experience in perception. And

temporal transparency is consistent with the action guidance theory; we experience

events as present because they appear to us as opportunities for action, not because we

experience them as sharing the temporal locations of our experiences.

Next, I will connect the arguments of this chapter to the debate over the matching

thesis. As we shall see, theories of temporal perception that deny the matching thesis

have sometimes seemed incoherent to philosophers because of the connection between

perceptual experience and the present. But on my view, the appearance of incoherence is

due to an implicit commitment to false views of phenomenal temporal presence. I will

show how the action guidance theory allows for a coherent and plausible understanding

130

of how perceptual experience can be present-directed without conforming to the

matching thesis.

131

Chapter 5

The Puzzle of the Specious Present

My overarching aim in these last few chapters has been to show that the denial of

the matching thesis is compatible with what we can know about perceptual experience

introspectively. In the previous chapter, I introduced a theory of perceptual experience’s

felt orientation towards the temporal present (I call this feature phenomenal temporal

presence). The theory explains that feature in terms of the role perceptual experience plays

in guiding action. I will now put the theory to work in defending views that deny the

matching thesis from what might seem to be a powerful argument concerning the

connection between perceptual experience and the temporal present (Le Poidevin 2007).

The argument is based on an alleged conflict between phenomenal temporal

presence and the doctrine of the specious present. But as I will argue, the conflict is really

between phenomenal temporal presence and anti-matching views in general, of which I

take the specious present doctrine to be an example. Here is James’s famous introduction

of the doctrine:

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 1890, 609-610)

James’ doctrine seems to involve at least three ideas. The first is that we perceive a

temporally extended duration, which he calls the ‘specious present.’ The second is that

132

the temporal extension of the specious present is what explains our capacity to perceive

relations of succession: we experience temporal relations between events only when they

occur within the same specious present. And the third idea is that we experience the

specious present as a whole, and our awareness of it is not successive: as James puts it,

we ‘do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it’.

Taken together, these ideas amount to a denial of the matching thesis within the

specious present. James claims that within the specious present, we do not experience

successiveness by having successive experiences of its temporal parts. We experience its

successiveness all at once. As we shall see, it is this anti-matching aspect of the doctrine

of the specious present that creates the apparent conflict with the phenomenal temporal

presence of perception. While I will follow other authors in using the term ‘specious

present’ in this chapter, the apparent conflict that I want to explore is between the denial

of the matching thesis and phenomenal temporal presence, and my use the term should

not be taken to strictly refer to James’ actual view.76

The appearance of conflict becomes clear when we appreciate another fact about

the temporal present: that it is supposed to be instantaneous, such that no change can

occur within it. These claims taken together make up what I will call the ‘puzzle of the

specious present’:

76 My main purpose here is to illustrate the features of the specious present doctrine that have struck philosophers such as Le Poidevin as incoherent. My aim is not historical accuracy. For a review of the history of the concept of the specious present, see Andersen (2009) and Andersen and Grush (2009). There are textual considerations that might motivate different interpretations of the doctrine: for example, James’s strikingly long estimates of its duration. And some philosophers have offered alternative ‘specious present’ theories that are consistent with extensionalism (e.g., Dainton 2000). I will also mostly ignore the issue, raised in Chapter 1, of whether James’s idea entails what I called the ‘temporal window view’ of temporal perceptual experience, and thus contradicts what I called the ‘event specific view.’

133

(1) We have perceptual experiences as of non-simultaneous events. [The doctrine of the specious present]

(2) Perceptual experience always exhibits a felt orientation towards the temporal present. [Phenomenal temporal presence]

(3) For any set of non-simultaneous events, at most one can be present. [Fact about the temporal present]

Each claim is plausible on its own, but they seem to be incompatible. If perceptual

experience presents its objects as present (by 2) and multiple non-simultaneous events

cannot all be present (by 3), then perceptual experience cannot present us with apparently

non-simultaneous events. For if it did, it would present those events as present, and thus,

as simultaneous. The way things perceptually appear would be systematically

inconsistent, and this seems not to be the case. Simply put, the puzzle is this: how can we

perceive non-simultaneity if perception is always directed at a momentary present?

This problem does not seem to arise for extensionalist views, on which we

experience temporally extended phenomena by having temporally extended experiences

that match them in temporal structure. For the extensionalist, it is the diachronic unity of

experiences that explains the experience of temporal relations like order. So, although

you can have a perceptual experience of A as preceding B, there will be no time at which

you are perceptually experiencing B and still having a perceptual experience of A. Thus,

there will be no time at which A and B will both seem to be temporally present in

perception.77 This line of thought suggests that the puzzle might be developed into an

argument for extensionalism, and against anti-matching views. If we accept that we have

77 See Rashbrook-Cooper (2017) for further discussion of extensionalism and temporal presence.

134

perceptual experiences of temporal structure, and that these experiences are

characterized by phenomenal temporal presence, then perhaps we must accept

extensionalism.

In what follows, I aim to block such an argument by resolving the puzzle. I will

first survey various responses, some of which have been defended in the recent literature

on temporal experience. I then defend my own response, which is that the puzzle arises

because of a faulty conception of phenomenal temporal presence. I will criticize views on

which perceptual experience has phenomenal temporal presence because it represents

events as being present, or, more generally, because temporal presence is part of what we

experience in perception. Instead, we should adopt the action guidance theory. On that

theory, the phenomenal temporal presence of perception is to be understood in terms of

its distinctive connections to action and cognition, or in other words, its characteristic

functional role. Crucially, I will argue that it is possible for a perceptual experience of a

temporally extended interval to play this role, and that therefore there is no conflict

between perception’s present-tensed character, properly understood, and the idea of the

specious present.

5.1 Extant Responses to the Puzzle

One possible response is to argue that James’s initially appealing doctrine of the

specious present (and the denial of the matching thesis, more generally) should be

rejected. Le Poidevin clearly articulates this line of thought:

If we have a single experience of two items as being present, then, surely, we experience them as simultaneous. Suppose we are aware of A as preceding B, and

135

of B as present. Can we be aware of A as anything other than past? Of course we can have successive experience of items, each of which, in turn, we see as present. But no single experience presents all these items as present. (2007, 87)

The doctrine of the specious present… does not allow us [to] retain the datum that we perceive we perceive as present, and this is what, ultimately, makes it so implausible. (91)

Le Poidevin is surely right that if experiencing multiple events as present involved

experiencing them as simultaneous, the doctrine of the specious present, and anti-

matching views in general, would be implausible.78 But I take this to be a challenge for

the doctrine, rather than a refutation. I will argue that Le Poidevin is too confident in the

idea that perceiving as present amounts to perceiving as simultaneous, and that the action

guidance theory allows us to understand the connection between perception and the

present differently.

How else might we solve the puzzle? One possibility is to endorse a theory of

perceptual experience on which it presents an extended interval, but only one moment in

it is experienced as present. For example, Husserl’s (1928/1964, 1991) conception of

experience involves awareness of a present moment (what he calls the primal impression)

as well as a retention as of the immediate past and a protention as of the immediate future

78 One might wonder why this issue arises for temporal presence but not spatial presence. We perceive objects as spatially present to us (in some sense), but this seems to be no barrier to perceiving spatial extension. The reason seems to be that spatial presence in perceptual experience involves objects being apparently spatially related to our location, in some direction and at some distance. But there is no precise here where perceived objects appear to be located, and thus the various objects we perceive at a time need not appear to be in the same location. In contrast, philosophers such as Le Poidevin seem to think of perceptual experience as presenting events as temporally located in the same moment: the now. That is, we do not perceive events as merely temporally related to the now, where they might be separated from it by some distance in some direction.

136

(akin to an expectation). On this view, we can perceptually experience events as past or as

future, as well as experiencing them as present. One challenge for this view is to defend

the claim that the past-directed retention and the future-directed protention are

genuinely perceptual, and to explain why they should not count as varieties of cognitive,

non-perceptual awareness. This challenge does not seem insurmountable, and I will not

try to refute this view here. However, I want to explore ways of resolving the puzzle that

do not involve denying that there is a deep tie between perceptual experience and the

present, and that part of what distinguishes perceptual experience from memory and

anticipation is its distinctive temporal orientation.

Another solution would be to deny that perceptual appearances are consistent

with respect to temporal order. If this is right, then one can just accept (1)-(3), and accept

their apparent implications as well. The claims imply that perceptual experience presents

things inconsistently, but they are not themselves inconsistent. On this proposal, for any

events one perceptually experiences as successive, one experiences them as simultaneous

as well. In practice, I know of no one who argues for this view and it is hard to see how

such a description of temporal phenomenology could be accurate. When we hear an

utterance, for example, we clearly hear the words, syllables and phonemes as occurring

in a particular order. But, as Le Poidevin puts it, if the proposed view were correct, we

would hear only a “confusing jumble of sounds” somehow appearing as both successive

and simultaneous (2007, 80).79

79 In Chapter 2, I argued for the possibility of transitivity failures for perceived simultaneity. One might wonder whether such failures allow for a view on which perceptual experience can simultaneously present multiple events as present while also presenting them as non-simultaneous with each other. I will argue against such a view in my discussion of the ‘B-theoretic content account’ in Section 5.2.

137

We could also deny (3): that a set of non-simultaneous events cannot all be present.

This does not seem like a genuine possibility as long as we interpret claim (3) as being

about the metaphysical present and we accept that the metaphysical present is

durationless. But, ultimately, I will argue that we should not think of phenomenal

temporal presence as an orientation towards the metaphysical present, and so the

temporal extent of the present is a red herring.

The solution to the puzzle that I will argue for is partly inspired by Grush (2016),

who distinguishes between what he calls A-ish and B-ish temporal content, (named for

McTaggart’s (1908) famous distinction between the A-series and the B-series of times). The

A-series uses tensed descriptions of times: as past, present and future. As the present time

changes, an event’s location in the A-series changes (first future, then present, then past).

The B-series uses tenseless descriptions of times, and relates times by earlier-than and

later-than relations that do not change. Grush’s A-ish temporal content presents events

in A-series terms (i.e., as past, present and future) while B-ish content presents them in

B-series terms (i.e., as earlier, later and simultaneous).

Grush’s claim is that at the “macro scale” our experiences are aptly characterized

in A-ish terms (7). For example, when I throw the Frisbee and watch the dog catch it, at

the moment he catches it, I am no longer perceptually aware of the Frisbee as being in

mid-air, or as being in my hand before the throw (although I remember these things). At

a coarse level of temporal detail, one event is singled out as present. But Grush thinks

that when we ‘zoom in’ on the temporal details of experience, perceptual content is B-ish.

During intervals below approximately 200 milliseconds—what Grush conceives of as the

specious present—we experience events as standing in B-series relations to each other,

but we do not experience a particular instant within the interval as the present. Thus, the

perceptual present moment is temporally extended. We can experience two events as

138

non-simultaneous (within the specious present) even when, considered on the ‘macro

scale,’ they are all part of the perceptual present.

Grush’s view seems to be a promising way for the specious present theorist to

conceive of the perceptual present. But what does it mean to say that on the macro scale

we experience some event as present, yet on the micro scale it is temporally extended?

Grush’s model of temporal perception—the trajectory estimation model—is a model of

representational content on the micro scale. It involves the representation of B-series

temporal relations between events within 200 millisecond intervals, but no representation

of temporal presence. So where does the perceptual experience of presence enter the

picture? How should we explain the difference in felt temporal orientation between

perception and memory? And what does it mean—in terms of perceptual

phenomenology—to say that this is a difference that ‘shows up’ on only the macro scale?

I think that we can satisfactorily answer these questions, but only once we

recognize that the experience of the present is not to be explained in terms of what we

perceive.

5.2 Is Temporal Presence a Property That We Perceptually Experience?

Philosophers discussing temporal experience sometimes take for granted that the

connection between perception and the present implies that a perceptual experience must

present its events as occurring simultaneously. We have already seen Le Poidevin make

this assumption, and Prosser treats the claim that “[e]xperience presents us with just a

single moment in time” as an implication of the claim that we perceive the present (2016,

25). But few philosophers have attempted to explain what perception’s connection with

139

the present consists in, and without such an explanation, it’s unclear whether such

assumptions are warranted. In this section, I will introduce and criticize two theories of

that connection. Then, I will show how my own theory of that connection—the action

guidance account—avoids the implication that present-directedness is a matter of being

directed at an instant during which nothing can change.

So far, I have not directly discussed the metaphysical debate about the present:

namely, the debate over whether there is an objective, observer-independent fact about

which time is present. The A-theory of time (named after McTaggart’s A-series) holds that

which time is present is an objective fact, and so there is some observer-independent

property had by, and only by, the present time. Call this property the A-theoretic property

of presence. The B-theory (named after the B-series) holds that there is no such property,

and which time is present is not an observer-independent fact (being temporally present

is akin to being here). Different versions of the A-theory result, depending on whether

one takes the A-theoretic property to be a fundamental property, or something to be

explained in terms of more basic properties of temporal reality. For example, on the

moving spotlight theory, all times—past, present and future—are real, but one time

uniquely instantiates a fundamental property of being present (akin to being lit up by a

spotlight). Here, the property of presence is not explained in terms of anything else. But

on the growing block theory of time, temporal reality is constantly expanding. The past is

real, as is the present, but the future is not yet real. The growing block theorist need not

believe that the property of presence is fundamental, since the present can be defined in

an observer-independent way as the latest time-slice of the growing block.80

80 One version of the A-theory, presentism, raises a special set of problems in accounting for temporal experience, since it claims that what is presently occurring is all that exists. For example, it is not clear that

140

What I will call the A-theoretic property account of phenomenal temporal presence

is the view that perceptual experience always presents events as instantiating an A-

theoretic property of presence (which property this is, exactly, will depend on one’s

preferred version of the A-theory), and that experience’s presenting events this way is

what the phenomenal temporal presence of perceptual experience consists in.81

As a theory about perceptual phenomenology, the A-theoretic property account is

logically independent of the A-theory itself. An A-theorist might deny that perceptual

experience presents events as instantiating A-theoretic properties, while maintaining that

such properties exist (perhaps claiming that we know about them in other ways). And a

B-theorist might accept the A-theoretic property account of the feeling of presence while

denying that there are any A-theoretic properties. This would commit them to an error

theory of perceptual experience: reality perceptually appears A-theoretic, but this

appearance is always illusory.82

we can explain how we could experience change, as the presentist A-theorist conceives of it, if presentism were correct. See Frischhut (2017) for discussion of these issues. 81 In the debate over the metaphysics of time, A-theorists and B-theorists often agree that phenomenology appears to favour the A-theory over the B-theory. For B-theorists, the challenge is to explain why our experience appears this way if the B-theory is true. See, e.g., Mellor (1985); (1998); Le Poidevin (2007); Callendar (2008); Paul (2010); Prosser (2012). The explanation might involve perceptual experience in a number of ways: perception might seem to present us with an A-theoretic property of presence, with genuine temporal passage (i.e., objective changes in which time is present), or with A-theoretic changes in objects (i.e., changes whose nature is inconsistent with the B-theory). If B-theorists accept that perceptual experience seems to present us with such things, they will claim that these experiences are illusory. My argument in this section has limited significance for this debate: what I say might block one possible argument for the A-theory, based on the claim that we perceptually experience A-theoretic presence, but it cannot address the full range of phenomenological considerations A-theorists might appeal to. To illustrate, consider that we seem to be aware of a ‘moving now’ not only in perceptual experience, but also in episodic memory, conscious thought, imagination, mind-wandering, etc. The intuitive appeal of the A-theory does not seem to trace back exclusively to perceptual experience. 82 Chalmers (2006) suggests this as a natural corollary of his general view of ‘Edenic’ perceptual qualities, whose instantiation would be required for perceptual experience to be ‘perfectly’ veridical. Explaining how the view applies to the case of time, he writes that it is a “natural suggestion” that “the Edenic content of temporal experience requires A-theoretic time, with some sort of true flow or passage” (2006, 64). If our universe is as the B-theorist claims it is, then such experiences are only ever ‘imperfectly’ veridical.

141

The view might be elaborated in different ways depending on one’s theory of

perceptual phenomenal character. For example, naive realists think that the phenomenal

character of perceptual experience is constituted by the subject standing in a relation of

awareness to ordinary, external objects and properties. On this view, the A-theoretic

property account would claim that when we perceive the scene at an intersection, we

stand in a relation of awareness to things like the shapes and colours of the cars and the

sounds of their engines, but we also stand in that same awareness relation to the A-

theoretic property of presence. This version of the view is unavailable to the B-theorist,

since they insist that there is no such A-theoretic property for us to be related to.

Representationalists about perceptual experience think that the phenomenal character of

perceptual experience is constituted by its representational content—that is, by how it

represents the world to be. On this view, the A-theoretic property account amounts to the

claim that one’s perceptual experience of the intersection represents the cars as having

certain shapes and colours, and other sensory qualities, but it also represents the event of

these qualities being instantiated as having the A-theoretic property of presence. This

version of the view is compatible with the metaphysical B-theory, since perceptual

experience might misrepresent the temporal properties of the world.83

We should distinguish this view of felt temporal presence from a closely-related,

but clearly inadequate view, which is that what explains the temporal orientation of

perception is the fact that our perceptual experiences themselves have the A-theoretic

83 Indirect theorists think that perceptual experience involves relations of direct awareness to mental items or properties, such as sense-data, mental paint or qualia. For them, the A-theoretic property account amounts to the claim that we are indirectly perceptually aware of A-theoretic presence in the world in virtue of our direct awareness of some mental property. The mental property of which we are directly aware might simply be A-theoretic presence, in which case the view entails the A-theory, or it might be something else, in which case it does not.

142

property of presence. This view cannot explain the difference in felt temporal orientation

between perception, memory and imagination. Episodic memories and acts of

imagination are experiences that occur in the present; if there is such a thing as an A-

theoretic property of presence, they can have it. But they lack phenomenal temporal

presence. When we remember an event, we experience it as past, and when we imagine

an event we might imagine it to occur at any time we choose, or at no time in particular.

Memories and acts of imagination are present experiences, but they do not present their

objects as present. Therefore, an experience having presence cannot be what explains its

felt temporal orientation. Instead, the view must be that perceptual experiences involve

relations of awareness to, or the representation of, the A-theoretic property of presence.

If we accept the A-theoretic property account, it is unsurprising that the specious

present should seem incoherent. If two events have the A-theoretic property of temporal

presence, they cannot be non-simultaneous, since the metaphysical present is supposed

to be temporally punctate. Someone might try offering a view of temporal metaphysics

on which the present is temporally extended, but if their only reason for doing so is to

explain the phenomenal temporal presence of perception in a way that is compatible with

the specious present, they need not. Other explanations are available.

Aside from the tension with the specious present, is the A-theoretic property

account a viable theory of phenomenal temporal presence? I think that the account is

coherent, but it comes with some unattractive costs. One issue is that it posits a property

that can be perceptually experienced but not remembered. In general, it seems that we

can remember the properties that we encounter in perceptual experience. But since the

account attempts to explain the felt temporal orientation of perceptual experience in

terms of awareness of the A-theoretic property, one cannot say that we can also remember

the property. Awareness of that property is supposed to be distinctive of perceptual

143

experiences. If one could also remember the property, the proposed explanation of the

temporal contrast between perception and memory would be undercut.84 One might try

replying that perceptual awareness of the property differs from memory awareness of it,

because in perceptual experience one experiences events as having it in memory one

experiences events as having had it. But this reply makes the A-theoretic property account

circular. It supposes that we already have a way of explaining the difference in felt

temporal orientation between perception and memory. If we already had such an

explanation, we would not need to accept the A-theoretic content account.

Aside from this issue, I think that we should be suspicious of the idea that we

could be perceptually aware of the A-theoretic property of presence in any way

analogous to perceptual awareness of other properties. Supposing that there is such a

property, it is dramatically unlike other perceptual qualities. Some philosophers (e.g.,

Siegel 2011) adopt a ‘liberal’ view of which properties we perceive, allowing that we can

perceive ‘high-level’ properties (including natural kind properties, like being a pine tree)

and not merely ‘low-level’ features (like colour, shape, texture and so on). But even if one

takes this liberal position, one shouldn’t think that temporal presence can be understood

on the model of other high-level properties. Capacities for perceptually recognizing high-

level properties like being a pine tree are grounded in capacities for recognizing certain

configurations of low-level properties. For example, you learn to recognize pine trees by

recognizing certain configurations of colours and shapes. But temporal presence is not

like this. There is no configuration of low-level properties such that we could learn to

84 The point that temporal orientation should not figure into the content of perception because memory preserves perceptual content is made by Matthen (2010c, 2014).

144

recognize temporal presence by recognizing it. In other words, it has no characteristic

‘look’ (or feel, sound, smell, taste, etc.). More generally, temporal presence is not attached

to any capacity for recognition or discrimination; perceptual experience does not enable

us to sort events into those that have it and those that lack it. Finally, temporal presence

cannot enter into the kinds of causal relations with our perceptual system that other

perceivable properties do: there are no neurons that differentially respond to the A-

theoretic property of presence.85 For these reasons, even if one thinks that the A-theory is

supported by some aspect of our conscious experience, one should not try to assimilate

awareness of the A-theoretic character of reality to other varieties of perceptual

awareness.

I will now turn to another possible explanation of perception’s felt temporal

orientation in terms of what we perceive: the B-theoretic content account, spelled out in

detail by Kriegel (2009b). On this view, when a subject perceptually experiences event E

as present, they have a perceptual experience P that has the representational content that

E occurs simultaneously with P itself. The view fits naturally with Kriegel’s (2009a)

commitment to thinking of conscious experiences as self-representational: perceptual

experiences always represent themselves in addition to representing external states of

affairs. The way perceptual experiences seems oriented towards the present consists in

85 This point is related to Prosser’s (2016) ‘multi-detector argument,’ which aims to show that the A-theoretic character of reality could not make any difference to our experiences, and thus experience cannot be said to favour the A-theory of time over the B-theory. My claim here is more modest. I am merely suggesting that if there is an A-theoretic property of presence, it cannot interact with sensory systems in the same way other perceivable qualities do. I take no stand on the claim that the supposed A-theoretic character of reality would make no difference to our experience at all.

145

the representation of relations of simultaneity between the experiences themselves and

their objects.86

We can think of the B-theoretic content account as explaining felt temporal

presence in terms closely related to a standard B-theoretic semantics for the indexical

‘now.’ Kaplan (1989) famously distinguishes the content of indexical expressions like

‘now’ from their character. On Kaplan’s view, indexicals are directly referential and their

content is their referent. The content of ‘now’ is the time specified (e.g., 3:59pm on January

21, 2019). The character is a function that determines a referent in a context. On the B-

theoretic content view, what the ‘now’ of perceptual experience contributes to

phenomenal character is analogous to Kaplan’s character: it is something like a descriptive

mode of presentation of a time (e.g., ‘the time of this very experience’), not the time itself.

This is important, since if it were the time itself (the ‘content,’ in Kaplan’s terms) that

showed up in the phenomenal character, it would be impossible to have phenomenally

identical experiences at different times. The experiences of even perfectly duplicated

brain states in perfectly duplicated environments would differ phenomenally simply

because they occurred at different times. And we would not have the promised

explanation of the apparent temporal contrast between perception and memory, since the

very same time could show up in the content of both perceptual experiences and

memories.

If we accept the B-theoretic content account, the idea of the specious present will

likely seem incoherent. Suppose a perceptual experience, P, represents two events, E1 and

86 Unlike the A-theoretic property account, this account presupposes representationalism. Perhaps a different, relationalist-friendly version of the view might say that phenomenal character is partly constituted by the actual relation of simultaneity between an experience and its objects (rather than representations of the relation). But I will focus on the representationalist version here.

146

E2, as successive. On the B-theoretic content account, P must represent each event as

simultaneous with P itself. Logically, by the transitivity of simultaneity, if both E1 and E2

are simultaneous with P, then E1 and E2 must be simultaneous as well, rather than

successive. But note that this does not immediately imply that the experience will be

incoherent. As I argued in Chapter 2, there could be failures of the transitivity of perceived

simultaneity in perceptual experience, and so E1 and E2 might not be explicitly

represented (or experienced) as simultaneous with each other, despite each being

represented as simultaneous with P. However, this does not seem to be a plausible way

of reconciling the specious present with the B-theoretic content account. As I argued in

Chapter 2, there might be occasional failures of transitivity for perceived simultaneity.

They might occur when the duration between events is near the threshold for perceiving

temporal order, especially when the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) for different

stimuli pairs is being experimentally manipulated. Such failures might exist, although we

would not normally be in a position to know about them outside of special laboratory

settings designed for manipulating and measuring the PSS. But it seems implausible that

there could be constant failures of transitivity all throughout the specious present

(somewhere between 100 and 500 milliseconds on most estimates) without us noticing

them. The problem for the specious present/B-theoretic content combination is not that

transitivity failures for perceived simultaneity are inconceivable. It is rather that it seems

unbelievable, as well as ad hoc, to suggest that each discriminable instant of the specious

present is always experienced as simultaneous with some master event P, while none of

those instants is ever experienced as simultaneous with another.87

87 To reconcile the specious present with the B-theoretic content account, one might try suggesting that the temporal indexical element in perceptual experience picks out an interval rather than an instant. By

147

Aside from its incompatibility with the specious present, I think that the B-

theoretic content account is coherent, although it is committed to an unattractive

consequence. The account is in tension with the temporal transparency thesis, which I

argued for in Chapter 3. The thesis says that it is not possible to directly introspectively

attend to temporal aspects of our experiences—we can attend only to the temporal

aspects of the events we experience. On the B-theoretic content account, perceptual

experience involves awareness of not just external events, but also awareness of our

experiences of them, and of temporal relations between the external events and the

experiences. In fact, Kriegel accepts the implication that awareness of our experiences

and their intrinsic, non-representational properties is not just possible but ubiquitous

(2009a, 181). It seems that on his view, the temporal transparency thesis is not just false

but radically mistaken: every perceptual experience is a counterexample.

Kriegel is aware of this objection to his self-representational view of perceptual

experience, and he is in fact sympathetic to the general transparency thesis (although he

does not directly discuss the temporal version). But he thinks that the transparency thesis

can be reconciled with the idea that perceptual experiences always involve awareness of

themselves. To do this, he distinguishes between focal awareness, which applies to

whatever is centrally highlighted by attention, and peripheral awareness, which applies to

experienced items that contribute to experience’s overall phenomenal character without

analogy, the spatial indexical ‘here’ usually picks out a spatially extended location rather than a spatial point. And perhaps there are uses of the temporal indexical ‘now’ which similarly pick out a temporally extended interval (e.g., if I can truly report “We are leaving now,” slightly before we begin to leave). So we might suggest that whenever you perceptually experience some set of events, your experience represents the events as occurring approximately simultaneously with the experience itself—but this does not entail that it represents each event in the set as simultaneous with each of the others (because approximate simultaneity is not transitive). Such a view seems coherent, but I would nonetheless reject it for the reasons I discuss in the main text to do with temporal transparency.

148

being focally highlighted (2009a, 182-184). He claims that the self-representational

element of experience is always peripheral and never focal. So, he argues, the

transparency thesis is correct, insofar as we cannot direct introspective attention to the

self-representational element of experience. To do so would be to make it focal when it is

necessarily peripheral.

On this view, the temporal properties of one’s experience are always part of

peripheral awareness. Phenomenal temporal presence consists in the representation of

simultaneity between certain external events (awareness of which might be focal or

peripheral) and an item which is always on the periphery (one’s experience itself). This

view seems coherent, and it might even seem natural to suggest that if we are aware of

our experience and its temporal properties, that awareness usually sits on the periphery.

But it seems ad hoc to suggest that one cannot attend to this self-representational element

despite being constantly aware of it. In general, we can shift our attention to bring items

on the periphery into focus. Why not this one? Moreover, if one accepts the

phenomenological intuitions that motivate the temporal transparency thesis, one is not

likely to accept even peripheral awareness of experience’s temporal properties. Recall

Hoerl’s remark, which I quoted in Chapter 3, that “[t]here is just no scope within a

description of our experience of temporal properties for a distinction between those

experienced properties themselves and a point in time from which they are experienced”

(2018, 143). If that is right, then the temporal location of one’s experience does not figure

into either the focus or periphery of awareness. In sum, the B-theoretic content account is

coherent, but is at best an awkward fit with temporal transparency.

So far, we have seen why the doctrine of the specious present might seem

incoherent if we accepted a theory that explained phenomenal temporal presence in terms

of what properties we are aware of. But such theories are flawed in ways that have

149

nothing to do with their connections to the specious present doctrine. In the next section,

I argue that the appearance of incoherence disappears when we accept my theory of

phenomenal temporal presence.

5.3 The Action Guidance Theory and the Specious Present

If the phenomenal temporal presence of perception could be explained only by our

being perceptually aware of a property of presence, then perhaps the specious present

doctrine really would be incoherent. Fortunately, another explanation is available: the

action guidance theory. As I explained in the previous chapter, the theory claims that the

phenomenal temporal presence of perceptual experience consists in perceptual

experience’s characteristically direct role in guiding action.88 Perceptual experiences

directly set targets for action: perceptually experiencing an object allows a subject to select

the object to guide their action, where consciously selecting the object influences the

implementation of the action, much of which (at least usually) occurs outside of their

conscious awareness (Clark 2001). For example, I visually experience the glass on the

table before me, which allows me to select it as a target for reaching. When I consciously

initiate this action with the glass as my target, I influence the implementation details of

88 In the previous chapter, I suggested that the connection between phenomenal temporal presence and the functional property might not be constitution or identity, and that you might take a different view if you are reluctant to identify (or constitutively explain) phenomenal properties with dispositional functional properties (but keep in mind that phenomenal temporal presence might be a ‘complex’ aspect of phenomenology, explained partly in terms of the characteristic effects of perceptual experiences which include other phenomenal states). The simplest remedy would be to say that phenomenal temporal presence is constituted by the categorical basis of a perceptual experience’s causal role in guiding action. But one might also suggest that the feeling of presence consists in experience representing what Gibson calls affordances for action. I think the argument of this section (or something very similar) will still succeed if one thinks of the action guidance view in one of these ways.

150

the action—the precise grip aperture used to grasp it, for example. But I do not

consciously monitor these details. What we perceptually experience seems to be available

to directly guide action in this sense: we can select it, and thus allow it to control the

implementation of an action.

Moreover, I argued that this feeling of availability for action guidance is partly

constitutive of what makes perceptual experience perceptual. And I argued that this

feeling of availability for action guidance is connected to the temporal present because of

our implicit acceptance of a principle connecting perceptually guided action and the

temporal present: the action coordination principle, which says that for a perceptual

experience to guide an action, it must be an experience of how things are in the

(approximate) present. Because this principle underlies our understanding of

perceptually guided action, I claimed that we implicitly understand the feeling of

availability for action guidance, which is characteristic of perceptual experiences, as an

orientation towards the temporal present.

On this view, phenomenal temporal presence is to be explained in terms of the

psychological role that perceptual experience plays, rather than features of what we

perceptually experience. We are not perceptually acquainted with, nor do we

perceptually represent, the property of temporal presence, either as conceived by the A-

theory or the B-theory. We can now see what is wrong with the puzzle of the specious

present, introduced earlier in this chapter. Here is the puzzle again:

(1) We have perceptual experiences as of non-simultaneous events. (2) Perceptual experience always exhibits a felt orientation towards the temporal

present. (3) For any set of non-simultaneous events, at most one can be present.

151

The problem we faced was that these claims seemed to jointly imply that our perceptual

experiences are incoherent: the same set of events should appear to us as both

simultaneous (because of (2) and (3)) and successive (because of (1)). But if we understand

(2) along the lines recommended by the action guidance theory, the implication of

incoherence disappears. Claim (2), properly understood, is about a feeling corresponding

to the psychological role perceptual experience plays, not about how events appear to us

in experience. Therefore, it could not imply that how events appear in perceptual

experience is incoherent.

Here is an analogous case that might help to illuminate the point.89 To believe a

proposition P is to take P to be true. But we should not think of this connection between

belief and truth as a matter of truth figuring into the content of belief. We cannot explain

the connection by claiming that whenever one believes that P, the actual content of one’s

belief is the proposition that P is true. For one thing, adding truth to the content of belief

in this way does not help to identify what is distinctive about belief’s connection to truth.

One can desire that P is true, or fear that P is true as well. Rather, truth helps to characterize

the attitude of belief. Belief involves treating a proposition as true. Beliefs need not be

about truth.

89 See Matthen (2010b, 2010c) for another argument that ‘now’ and ‘true’ do not figure into the representational content of states like belief and perception. Kriegel (2015) offers a similar analogy to mine, comparing ‘belief in X’ with ‘believing X exists,’ and he uses it to make a similar point about perception and temporal presence. Kriegel’s view his (2015) paper is that perception does not represent objects as present, but rather represents-as-present objects (where representing-as-present is to be understood as a kind of mental attitude, rather than as the attitude of representing taken towards a certain content). Presence thus figures into the ‘attitude,’ rather than the content, of perception. I agree with this point, although I go further than Kriegel in explaining what is distinctive about the attitude of perception in terms of its connection to action. I am unsure about how Kriegel’s (2015) view is related to his earlier B-theoretic content view, or whether his later view is compatible with my suggestion that what’s distinctive about the ‘attitude’ of perception is its functional connections with action.

152

When we mistake features of a mental attitude for features of its content, we are

liable to make certain further errors. For example, someone with the wrong view of

belief’s connection to truth might think that there is something incoherent about a subject

who believes (perhaps as part of a general anti-realism about semantic notions) that there

is no such property as truth. If believing P is really believing that P is true—if truth is

always part of belief content—then no one could coherently believe that truth does not

exist, and that nothing is really true. If they believed that, then they would believe that

the proposition that nothing is true is true. This is a contradiction. On the better view of

belief’s connection to truth, there is no inconsistency in the content of such a person’s

beliefs. They have the belief attitude towards the proposition that nothing is true, and

having the belief attitude involves treating the proposition as true. It might turn out that

explaining what it means to ‘treat something as true’ will require us to accept that truth

is a real property, and thus the right explanation of what belief is will show that their

belief is false. But they are not straightforwardly contradicting themselves.

My diagnosis of the puzzle of the specious present is similar. Once we recognize

that perception’s connection to the present is to be explained in terms of the functional

role perceptual experience plays, rather than perceptual content or, more generally, what

we perceive, the idea that perceptual experience represents or acquaints one with a

succession of events should seem perfectly coherent. Presence is not part of what is

perceptually experienced, so experience does not ‘say’ that events are both simultaneous

and successive. If there is a problem with the notion of the specious present, it cannot be

that it makes all perceptual experiences incoherent. Presence characterizes the type of

mental state that perception is, not the content that it has.

Combining the action guidance account with the doctrine of the specious present

yields the claim that a subject can perceptually experience a succession of events and that

153

the succession should seem to be available to the subject as a potential target for action.

This claim seems correct, insofar as temporally extended properties like motion and

change are obviously relevant to action. For example, when you grab the ball as it rolls

across the table, the ball’s movement is relevant to determining where you reach for it.

Its perceived state at an instant would be insufficient to generate a prediction about where

it will be, and it is too late to grab it where you have already seen it.

One might nonetheless wonder what it could mean for an event, or a succession

of events, rather than an object, to appear to be available as a target for one’s action. When

you visually experience the ball rolling across the table, what you select to act upon is the

ball, not an event or succession of events involving it. But this is not a problem. For an

event to be available is simply for the objects involved in the event to be available for

selection. In the example, you are perceptually aware of both an event (the ball moving

between locations) and an object (the ball). The specious present seems to be no

theoretical barrier to experience playing the role of setting the ball as a target.

A seemingly deeper challenge for the combined action guidance/specious present

view is to explain how experiences of the specious present can contribute to the temporal

coordination of action. Many actions demonstrate sensitivity to small temporal differences

between events. For example, baseball players can hit a baseball travelling at 100 miles

per hour. At that speed, the time between the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand and crossing

the plate is about 400 milliseconds, and the window of time within which it can be hit is

much shorter: between ten and twenty milliseconds to hit a fair ball (Adair 2002, Chapter

3). And musicians can synchronize their movements with rhythms of 32nd notes. At a

tempo of 100 beats per minute, each note would be separated by just 75 milliseconds.

And a note played more than, say, ten to twenty milliseconds away from the beat will

sound out of time. But on the specious present theory, the perceptual experiences guiding

154

these actions must be directed at extended intervals. This means that the subject

experiences a temporally extended interval, a single specious present, ‘all at once’. On

most theories of the specious present, its duration is longer than the windows of time that

we are capable of singling out in our actions (Grush estimates that it lasts 200

milliseconds, for example). So how does the specious present contribute to the temporal

coordination of such actions?

The performance of temporally precise actions requires that the subject can

differentially respond to non-simultaneous events presented together in a single specious

present. For example, suppose that a subject is listening to music, and that the specious

present of her current perceptual experience includes both a downbeat and an upbeat.

Suppose she wants to tap her finger on the next downbeat. To do this, she must somehow

track the duration between downbeats, d seconds, and tap her finger d seconds after the

downbeat in the current specious present. But, by hypothesis, the downbeat and the

upbeat are experienced all at once, and neither is picked out as happening now. So how

can she achieve the correct delay, and tap on the next downbeat rather than the next

upbeat, or somewhere else? How can she pick out a time within the specious present as

the one that is relevant for temporally coordinating her action?

This line of thought seems vexing for the specious present theory only insofar as

we are implicitly committed to the idea that the temporal coordination of action must

involve tracking a master now representation, and that we achieve the correct delay

between stimulus and action by using the master now as a guide. On this picture, the

subject could not find the next downbeat, because her sense of what is going on now—

the content of her master now representation—would presumably include both the

downbeat and the upbeat, since they occur in the same specious present. But this picture

of the temporal coordination of action should be rejected. It is really just the residue of

155

the version of the specious present theory that we have already dismissed as incoherent.

We should not think of the specious present as representing its contents as occurring now,

where this implies that they occur simultaneously. And likewise, we should not think of

the perceptual and motor systems as coordinating by drawing on a master now

representation whose contents are supposed to be both co-present and successive.

Temporally coordinating action does not require any such master now

representation. Grush persuasively argues for this point in defense of his view that the

content of perceptual experiences is exclusively ‘B-ish’ (2016, 10-11).90 Achieving the

correct delay between the downbeat and the tap requires that the perceptual and motor

systems exhibit sensitivity to temporal relations between events. They must coordinate

to achieve simultaneity between the next downbeat and the tap. There is no reason to

suppose that achieving the correct delay requires that the current downbeat, the next

downbeat, or the various states of one’s finger are ever represented as present, as past or

as future. What matters is that perceptual and motor systems have some way of

identifying the time of the downbeat, t, the required delay, d, and that they can produce

a certain action d seconds after t. But all of this can be explained in terms of the

representation of ‘B-ish’ temporal properties of external events, as well as B-ish temporal

properties of the stages of one’s action. We need not suppose that any perceptual event

or any motoric event is represented as occurring now, as long as the perceptual and motor

90 Hoerl discusses a similar objection concerning the temporal coordination of action directed at the view he calls molecularism: an extensionalist version of the specious present doctrine (2009, 2). Despite the fact I am defending a non-extensionalist version of the specious present, I take Hoerl to be offering a similar response to the temporal coordination objection when he writes that the “thought that my experience must mark out one time in contrast to others as present in order to explain why I act at that time seems to ignore the fact that my action itself is something that unfolds over time,” and that there is “no reason to think that the intentions behind my acting must slice time more finely than experience does on a molecularist account” (14).

156

systems are capable of representing, with sufficient precision, relationships of

simultaneity and order between the two sorts of events. In short, temporally coordinated

action requires the representation of temporal properties, both of perceived events and

one’s actions, but it does not require the representation of temporal presence.

The idea of a master now representation guiding action might seem compelling if

we implicitly conceive of the time of the experience itself as playing a crucial role in the

temporal coordination of action. If the subject can time her next tap only by waiting d

seconds after her experience of the present downbeat, she will not be able to reliably land

her tap on the next one. On the specious present theory, her experience of the downbeat

occurs at the same time as her experience of the upbeat (because they occur in the same

specious present). In general, we cannot differentially react to non-simultaneous events

within a specious present if we use the temporal location of the experience itself to

coordinate our reaction. But it is a mistake to think that we temporally coordinate our

actions in this way. The temporal properties represented by the experience are what is

relevant to timing one’s action, and according to the specious present theory, these are

not the same as the temporal properties of the experience itself. On my view, our sense

of now in perceptual experience is not given by the time that the experience seems to occur

(the view that it is determined in this way is the B-theoretic content account, which I

criticized in the previous section). Moreover, as I argued in Chapter 3, perceptual

experience is temporally transparent, and we cannot directly access the temporal

properties of our perceptual experiences themselves, as opposed to those of the events

we seem to perceive. Our sense of the temporal location of our perceptual experience

does not figure into the explanation of temporal presence in perceptual phenomenology,

and it does not figure into an explanation of how we temporally coordinate actions either.

157

So far, my claims about how the specious present theorist should conceive of the

temporal coordination of action have been negative: we do not coordinate our actions by

using a master now representation, or by attending to the apparent temporal properties

of our experiences themselves. What positive account can the specious present theorist

offer instead? Here, I think the details are matters for empirical investigation. That said,

the distinction I’ve drawn on, following Clark, between consciously selecting an action

and controlling the implementation of the action seems relevant. Consider again the

examples of hitting a fastball and of tapping one’s finger to the beat. As I noted, these are

feats of prediction rather than reaction. By the time the baseball is in a place where it can

be hit, it is far too late to begin one’s swing (Sherwin et al. 2012). And we do not

synchronize with a piece of music by reacting to each beat, but rather by predicting where

the beat will be (see, e.g., Grahn and Rowe 2013). Such actions are usually consciously

selected: the baseball player and the musician know what they are doing and intend to do

it. But the precise details of their implementation are not consciously monitored. Sports

psychologists frequently describe the acquisition of a skill like hitting a baseball as

involving certain aspects of performance becoming automatic, no longer falling under

one’s conscious control (see, e.g., Abernethy et al. 2007). As the baseball player Yogi Berra

allegedly put it, “you can’t think and hit at the same time.”91 This reinforces the point

that we do not temporally coordinate our actions by introspectively attending to the time

of our experiences. The batter is focused on swinging the bat when the ball crosses the

plate, not on, e.g., identifying the precise moment when he visually experiences it leaving

the pitcher’s hand. For those of us who are not expert athletes or musicians, even

91 Sherwin et al.’s (2012) title is borrowed from this remark, attributed to Berra.

158

everyday activities like walking illustrate the same point. When you walk, your attention

is not focused on exactly how or when to contract your muscles or bend your joints, and

focusing on such details is more likely to hurt performance than to help. At a certain level

of detail, the implementation of actions—including their temporal coordination—seems

to usually be an unconscious affair. We should expect that conscious control will play at

most a limited role in the full story of how the experiences of the specious present enable

temporally coordinated actions.

5.4 Concluding Remarks

I began this chapter with a puzzle: how can we have perceptual experiences of

temporally extended phenomena if such experiences always seem to be directed at the

present? The solution, I have suggested, is to reconceive how perceptual experience is

oriented towards the present along the lines of the action guidance account. Perception

does not represent events as occurring in the present moment. Rather, it enables its

subjects to use its deliverances to directly guide actions, and we implicitly think of

perceptually guided actions as depending for their success on the (approximate)

temporal presence of the events experienced. Thus, we think of perception’s distinctive

connection to action as an orientation towards the present.

We can now see how Grush’s distinction between A-ish and B-ish temporal

properties could characterize what we experience at different timescales. Grush’s view

was that over certain brief intervals we experience only B-ish temporal properties and

relations: order, simultaneity and duration. Over longer intervals, we also experience A-

ish properties, including temporal presence. I noted that this seems to be a promising

159

way to resolve the puzzle of the specious present, but that it was hard to understand what

it could mean that we experience A-ish properties over longer intervals. The action

guidance view offers an interpretation: over sufficiently brief intervals, temporally

extended states of affairs seem to be directly available for guiding action, and their

seeming available in this way is what phenomenal temporal presence consists in. No

particular time within such an interval is marked out as the present. Because perceptual

experience does not represent events as occurring during a punctate present moment, it

can consistently present us with temporally extended events. Thus, we can explain the

sense in which perception is oriented both towards the present and towards temporally

extended events.

This theory helps to fill in my ongoing story about how perceptual

phenomenology is in fact compatible with the denial of the matching thesis. We have

seen that taking seriously the full breadth of temporal phenomena we encounter in

perceptual experience requires us to adopt the view that we have perceptual experiences

of temporal structure. But it might seem that paying attention to perceptual

phenomenology tells us—obviously, unmistakably—that we can have an experience of a

temporally structured event only by having experiences that match its temporal

structure. I think that these intuitions are powerful and worth taking seriously. But I also

think that they can be naturally explained on views that deny the matching thesis. I have

argued that the ‘direct’ introspective evidence is consistent with the denial of the

matching thesis (at least over brief intervals), because it is in fact based on our indirect

and imperfect access to the temporal features of our experiences. Here, I have considered

whether the fact that perceptual experience is directed towards the present might support

the thesis, since one might think that anti-matching views implausibly imply that we

have experiences of events as both successive and co-present. But I have argued that this

160

alleged problem traces back to a flawed theory of the felt present-orientation of

perceptual experience, one on which presence is a property that our experiences ascribe

to external events. Reconceiving perception’s present-orientation as a feeling of being

poised to guide action allows anti-matching theorists to avoid the implausible

consequence.

Although existing experimental results are suggestive, I argued in Chapter 2 that

whether the matching thesis is true is an open empirical question. But I want to insist that

the question really is open, in the sense that phenomenological considerations do not

provide strong support for the thesis, much less settle the matter. I have argued that the

denier of matching should adopt certain views of perceptual experience to explain our

phenomenological intuitions. But, as we have seen, these views are not ad hoc; matching

critics do not need to manipulate or mischaracterize the phenomenological data to save

the theory. Rejecting the matching thesis might limit the range of possible philosophical

views about perceptual experience one can take, but the theoretical options remaining

are not only coherent but independently plausible as well. And developing them in detail

helps us to better understand how perception enables us to experience and respond to

the temporal characteristics of the world.

161

Bibliography

Abernethy, B., Maxwell, J. P., Masters, R. S. W., Van der Kamp, J., & Jackson, R. C. (2007). Attentional Processes in Skill Learning and Expert Performance. In G. Tenenbaum & R. C. Eklund (Eds.), Handbook of Sports Psychology. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons.

Adair, R. (2002). The Physics of Baseball. 3rd Edition. New York: Harper Collins.

Andersen, H. (2009). The Development of the ‘Specious Present’ and James’ Views on Temporal Experience. In D. Lloyd & V. Arstila (Eds.), Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Andersen, H. & Grush, R. (2009). A Brief History of Time Consciousness: Historical Precursors to James and Husserl. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 47 (2): 277-309.

Aristotle. (2014). The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, One-Volume Digital Edition. (J. Barnes, Ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Arstila, V. (2012a). Time Slows Down During Accidents. Frontiers in Psychology, 3 (196): 1-10.

Arstila, V. (2012b). Why the Transitivity of Perceptual Simultaneity Should be Taken Seriously. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6 (3): 1-3.

Arstila, V. (2015). Keeping Postdiction Simple. Consciousness and Cognition, 38: 205–216.

Arstila, V. (2018). Temporal Experiences without the Specious Present. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96 (2): 287–302.

Bååth, R, Seno, T., & Kitaoka, A. (2014). Cats and Illusory Motion. Psychology, 5: 1131-1134.

162

Bauer, G., Gerstenbrand, F., & Rumpl, E. (1979). Varieties of Locked-in Syndrome. Journal of Neurology, 221 (2): 77-91.

Bayne, T. & Montague M. (Eds.). (2011). Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

von Békésy, G. (1963). Interaction of Paired Sensory Stimuli and Conduction in Peripheral Nerves. Journal of Applied Physiology, 18: 1276-1284.

Block, N. (1978). Troubles with Functionalism. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 9: 261-325.

Block, N. (1992). Begging the Question Against Phenomenal Consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15 (2): 205-206.

Block, N. (1996). Mental Paint and Mental Latex. Philosophical Issues, 7: 19–49.

Block, N. (2010). Attention and Mental Paint. Philosophical Issues, 20 (1): 23-63.

Block, R. A., Hancock, P. A., & Zakay, D. (2010). How Cognitive Load Affects Duration Judgments: A Meta-analytic Review. Acta Psychologica, 134: 330-343.

Brentano, F. (1988). Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time and the Continuum. (B. Smith, Trans.), Beckenham: Croom Helm.

Brewer, B. (2011). Perception and its Objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Broad, C. D. (1923). Scientific Thought. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Brown, A. S. (2004). The Déjà Vu Experience. New York: Psychology Press.

Brown, S. W. & Smith-Petersen, G. A. (2014). Time Perception and Temporal Order Memory. Acta Psycholgica, 148: 173-180.

Byrne, A. (2001). Intentionalism Defended. The Philosophical Review, 110 (2): 199-240.

Callendar, C. (2008). The Common Now. Philosophical Issues, 18: 339-361.

163

Camp, E. (2007). Thinking with Maps. Philosophical Perspectives, 21 (1): 145-182.

Campbell, J. (2002). Reference and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cardoso-Leite, P., Gorea, A., & Mamassian, P. (2007). Temporal Order Judgment and Simple Reaction Times: Evidence for a Common Processing System. Journal of Vision, 7 (6): 11.

Carruthers, P. (1995). Conscious Experience Versus Conscious Thought. In Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carruthers, P. (2011). The Opacity of Mind: An Integrative Theory of Self-Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chaudhary, U., Xia, B., Silvoni, S., Cohen, L. G., & Birbaumer, N. (2017). Brain-Computer Interface-based Communication in the Completely Locked-in State. PLOS Biology, 15 (1): 1-25.

Chalmers, D. J. (2005). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2 (3): 200-219.

Chalmers, D. J. (2006). Perception and the Fall from Eden. In T. S. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Perceptual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chalmers, D. J. (2011). The Representational Character of Experience. In D. J. Chalmers (Ed.), The Character of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chuard, P. (2011). Temporal Experiences and Their Parts. Philosophers’ Imprint, 11 (11): 1-28.

Clark, A. (2001). Visual Experience and Motor Action: Are the Bonds Too Tight? Philosophical Review, 110: 495-519.

Corwin, T. R. & Boynton, R. M. (1968). Transitivity of Visual Judgments of Simultaneity. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 78: 560-568.

164

Crane, T. (1988). The Waterfall Illusion. Analysis, 48 (3): 142-147.

Cutter, B. & Tye, M. (2011). Tracking Representationalism and the Painfulness of Pain. Philosophical Issues, 21 (1): 90-109.

Dainton, B. (2000). Stream of Consciousness : Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience. London: Routledge.

Dainton, B. (2008). Sensing Change. Philosophical Issues, 18: 362-384.

Dainton, B. (2018). Temporal Consciousness. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/consciousness-temporal/>.

Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. New York: Black Bay Books.

Dennett, D. C. & Kinsbourne, M. (1992). Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15: 183-247.

Di Lollo, V. (1980). Temporal Integration in Visual Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 109 (1): 75-97.

Dickie, I. (2011). Visual Attention Fixes Demonstrative Reference by Eliminating Referential Luck. In C. Mole, D. Smithies, & W. Wu (Eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dickie, I. (2016). Fixing Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dretske, F. (1995). Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Efron, R. (1963). The Effect of Handedness on the Perception of Simultaneity and Temporal Order. Brain, 86: 261-284.

Evans, G. (1985). Molyneux’s Question. In G. Evans, Collected Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

165

Frischhut, A. (2017). Presentism and Temporal Experience. In I. Phillips (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience. Abingdon: Routledge.

Fujisaki, W., Shimojo, S., Kashino, M., & Nishida, S. (2004). Recalibration of Audiovisual Simultaneity. Nature Neuroscience, 7: 773-778.

Geldard, F. A. & Sherrick, C. E. (1972). The Cutaneous “Rabbit”: A Perceptual Illusion. Science, 178 (4057): 178-179.

Gibson, J. J. (1977). The Theory of Affordances. In R. Shaw and J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing. Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Goodale, M. & Milner, A. (1992). Separate Pathways for Perception and Action. Trends in Neurosciences, 15: 20-25.

Goodale, M & Milner, A. (2004). Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goodman, N. (1951). The Structure of Appearance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Gow, L. (2016). The Limitations of Perceptual Transparency. The Philosophical Quarterly, 66 (265): 723-744.

Grahn, J. A., & Rowe, J. B. (2013). Finding and Feeling the Musical Beat: Striatal Dissociations Between Detection and Prediction of Regularity. Cerebral Cortex, 23: 913-921.

Grondin, S. & Ulrich, R. (2011). Duration Discrimination Performance: No Cross-Modal Transfer from Audition to Vision Even after Massive Perceptual Learning. In A. Vatakis, A. Esposito, M. Giagkou, F. Cummins, & G. Papadelis (Eds.), Multidisciplinary Aspects of Time and Time Perception. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6789. New York: Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg: 92-100.

166

Grush, R. (2007a). Time and Experience. In T. Müller (Ed.), The Philosophy of Time. Frankfurt: Klosterman.

Grush, R. (2007b). Skill Theory v2.0: Dispositions, Emulation, and Spatial Perception. Synthese, 157 (3): 389-416.

Grush, R. (2016). On the Temporal Character of Temporal Experience, its Scale Non-invariance, and its Small Scale Structure. Manuscript.

Harman, G. (1990). The Intrinsic Quality of Experience. Philosophical Perspectives, 4: 31-52.

Harrar, V. & Harris, L. R. (2005). Simultaneity Constancy: Detecting Events with Touch and Vision. Experimental Brain Research, 166 (3-4): 465-473.

Harrar, V. & Harris, L. R. (2008). The Effect of Exposure to Asynchronous Audio, Visual, and Tactile Stimulus Combinations on the Perception of Simultaneity. Experimental Brain Research, 186 (4): 517-524.

Harris, L. R., Harrar, V., Jaekl, P., & Kopinska, A. (2010). Mechanisms of Simultaneity Constancy. In R. Nijhawan & B. Khurana (Eds.), Space and Time in Perception and Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hoerl, C. (2009). Time and Tense in Perceptual Experience. Philosophers’ Imprint, 9 (1): 1-18.

Hoerl, C. (2015). Seeing Motion and Apparent Motion. European Journal of Philosophy, 23 (3): 676-702.

Hoerl, C. (2018). Experience and Time: Transparency and Presence. Ergo, 5 (5): 127-151.

Hopkins, R. (2012). What Perky Did Not Show. Analysis, 72 (3): 431-439.

Husserl, E. (1991). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. (J. B. Brough, Trans.), Dordrecht: Kluwer.

167

Jackson, G. B. (2014). Skillful Action in Peripersonal Space. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 13 (2): 313-334.

James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover.

Kaplan, D. (1989). Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and Other Indexicals. In J. Almog, J. Perry, & H. Wettstein (Eds.), Themes from Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kelly, S. D. (2005). The Puzzle of Temporal Experience. In A. Brook (Ed.), Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, M. (2009). Heirs of Nothing: The Implications of Transparency. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 79 (3): 574-604.

Kind, A. (2001). Putting the Image Back in Imagination. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62: 85-109.

Koch, C. (2004). The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood: Roberts.

Kopinska, A. & Harris, L. R. (2004). Simultaneity Constancy. Perception, 33: 1049-1060.

Kriegel, U. (2009a). Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kriegel, U. (2009b). Temporally Token-Reflexive Experiences. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 39 (4): 585-617.

Kriegel, U. (2015). Experiencing the Present. Analysis, 75 (3): 407-413.

Le Poidevin, R. (2007). The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lee, G. (2014a). Temporal Experience and the Temporal Structure of Experience. Philosophers’ Imprint, 14 (3): 1-21.

168

Lee, G. (2014b). Atomism, Extensionalism, and Continuity. In N. Oaklander (Ed.), Debates in the Metaphysics of Time. London: Bloomsbury.

Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D. P. & Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1967). Perception of the Speech Code. Psychological Review, 74: 431-461.

Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8: 529-566.

Logue, H. (2012). Why Naive Realism? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 112: 211–237.

Machulla, T., Di Luca, M., & Ernst, M. O. (2016). The Consistency of Crossmodal Synchrony Perception Across the Visual, Auditory, and Tactile Senses. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42 (7): 1026-1038.

Martin, M. G. F. (2002). The Transparency of Experience. Mind and Language, 17 (4): 376-425.

Matthen, M. (2005). Seeing, Doing, and Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Matthen, M. (2010a). On the Diversity of Auditory Objects. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1 (1): 63-89.

Matthen, M. (2010b). Two Visual Systems and the Feeling of Presence. In N. Gangopadhay, M. Madary, & F. Spicer (Eds.), Perception, Action, and Consciousness: Sensorimotor Dynamics and Two Visual Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Matthen, M. (2010c). Is Memory Preservation? Philosophical Studies, 148 (1): 3-14.

Matthen, M. (2014). Image Content. In B. Brogaard (Ed.), Does Perception Have Content? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McKelvie, S. J. (1995). The VVIQ as a Psychometric Test of Individual Differences in Visual Imagery Vividness: A Critical Quantitative Review and a Plea for Direction. Journal of Mental Imagery, 19: 1-106.

169

McTaggart, J. E. (1908). The Unreality of Time. Mind, 17 (68): 457-474.

Mellor, H. (1985). Real Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mellor, H. (1998). Real Time II. London: Routledge.

Miller, I. (1984). Husserl, Perception and Temporal Awareness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Milner, A. & Goodale, M. (2006). The Visual Brain in Action: 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Milner, A. & Goodale, M. (2008). Two Visual Systems Re-viewed. Neuropsychologia, 46: 774-785.

Moore, G. E. (1903). The Refutation of Idealism. Mind, 12: 433-453.

Moskowitz, G. B., Li, P., & Kirk, E. R. (2004). The Implicit Volition Model: On the Preconscious Regulation of Temporarily Adopted Goals. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36: 317-413.

Nanay, B. (2010). Perception and Imagination: Amodal Perception as Mental Imagery. Philosophical Studies, 150: 239-254.

Nanay, B. (2012). The Philosophical Implications of the Perky Experiments: Reply to Hopkins. Analysis, 72 (3): 439-443.

Naveh-Benjamin, M. (1990). Coding of Temporal Order Information: An Automatic Process? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16 (1): 117-126.

Nelkin, N. (1989). Propositional Attitudes and Consciousness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 49 (3): 413-430.

Nishida, S. & Johnston, A. (1999). Influence of Motion Signals on the Perceived Position of a Spatial Pattern. Nature, 397: 610-612.

O’Callaghan, C. (2011). Lessons from Beyond Vision (Sounds and Audition). Philosophical Studies, 153: 143-160.

170

Paul, L. A. (2010). Temporal Experience. Journal of Philosophy, 107 (2): 333-359.

Pelzcar, M. (2015). Sensorama: A Phenomenalist Analysis of Spacetime and its Conents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Perky, C. W. (1910). An Experimental Study of Imagination. The American Journal of Psychology, 2: 432-452.

Phillips, I. (2010). Perceiving Temporal Properties. European Journal of Philosophy, 18 (2): 176–202.

Phillips, I. (2013). Perceiving the Passage of Time. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Soceity, 113 (3): 225-252.

Phillips, I. (2014a). The Temporal Structure of Experience. In D. Lloyd & V. Arstila (Eds.), Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Phillips, I. (2014b). Experience of and in Time. Philosophy Compass, 9 (2): 131–144.

Pisella, L., Binkofski, F., Lasek, K., Toni, I., & Rosetti, Y. (2006). No Double-dissociation Between Optic Ataxia and Visual Agnosia: Multiple Sub-streams for Multiple Visuo-manual Integrations. Neuropsychologia, 44: 2734-2748.

Pöppel, E. (1988). Mindworks: Time and Conscious Experience. (T. Artin, Trans.), New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Prinz, J. J. (2002). Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Prinz, J. J. (2011a). The Sensory Basis of Cognitive Phenomenology. In T. Bayne & M. Montague (Eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Prinz, J. J. (2011b). Is Attention Necessary and Sufficient for Consciousness? In C. Mole, D. Smithies, & W. Wu (Eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

171

Prinz, J. J. (2012). The Conscious Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Prosser, S. (2012). Why Does Time Seem to Pass? Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, 85 (1): 92-116.

Prosser, S. (2016). Experiencing Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Prosser, S. (2017). Rethinking the Specious Present. In I. Phillips (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience. Abingdon: Routledge.

Pryor, J. (2000). The Skeptic and the Dogmatist. Noûs, 34 (4): 517-549.

Raffman, D. (2012). Indiscriminability and Phenomenal Continua. Philosophical Perspectives, 26: 309-322.

Rankin, M. L. & McCormack, T. (2013). The Temporal Priority Principle: At What Age Does This Develop? Frontiers in Psychology, 4: Article 178.

Rashbrook-Cooper, O. (2017). Atomism, Extensionalism and Temporal Presence. In I. Phillips (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience. Abingdon: Routledge.

Reid, T. (1855). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. J. Walker (Ed.), Boston: Derby.

Repp, B. H. & Su, Y. (2013). Sensorimotor Synchronization: A Review of Recent Research (2006-2012). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20 (3): 403-452.

Rosebloom, W. & Arnold, D. H. (2011). Twice Upon a Time: Multiple Concurrent Temporal Recalibrations of Audiovisual Speech. Psychological Science, 22 (7): 872-877.

Rosetti, Y., Pisella, L., & Vighetto, A. (2003). Optic Ataxia Revisited: Visually Guided Action Versus Immediate Visuomotor Control. Experimental Brain Research, 153: 171-179.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2002). How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Visual Imagery. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9: 35-53.

172

Schwitzgebel, E. (2011). Perplexities of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Seager, W. (1993). Verificationism, Scepticism, and Consciousness. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 36 (1-2): 113-133.

Segal, S. J. & Fusella, V. (1970). Influence of Imaged Pictures and Sounds in Detection of Visual and Auditory Signals. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 83: 458-474.

Shardlow, J. “Minima Sensibilia: Against the Dynamic Snapshot Model of Temporal Experience.” European Journal of Philosophy: 1-17.

Shepard, R. (1964). “Circularity in Judgments of Relative Pitch.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 36 (12): 2346-2353.

Sherwin, J., Muraskin, J., & Sajda, P. (2012). You Can’t Think and Hit at the Same Time: Neural Correlates of Baseball Pitch Classification. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 6 (177): 1-11.

Sekuler, R., Sekuler A. B. & Lau, R. (1997). Sound Changes Perception of Visual Motion. Nature, 384: 308-309.

Siegel, S. (2011). The Contents of Visual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siegel, S. (2014). Affordances and the Contents of Perception. In B. Brogaard (Ed.), Does Perception Have Content? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, E. & Delargy, M. (2005). Locked-in Syndrome. BMJ, 330: 406-409.

Smithies, D. (2014). The Phenomenal Basis of Epistemic Justification. In M. Sprevak & J. Kallestrup (Eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Mind. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Smithies, D. (2019). The Epistemic Role of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Soteriou, M. (2013). The Mind’s Construction: The Ontology of Mind and Mental Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sternberg, S. & Knoll, R. L. (1973). The Perception of Temporal Order: Fundamental Issues and a General Model. Attention and Performance, 4: 629-685.

173

Stetson, C., Cui, X., Montague, P. R., & Eagleman, D. M. (2006). Motor-sensory Recalibration Leads to an Illusory Reversal of Action and Sensation. Neuron, 51 (5): 651-659.

Stetson, C., Fiesta, M. P., & Eagleman, D. M. (2007). Does Time Really Slow Down During a Frightening Event? PLoS ONE, 2 (2): e1295.

Tye, M. (1991). The Imagery Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tye, M. (1995). Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tye, M. (2002). Representationalism and the Transparency of Experience. Noûs, 36 (1): 137-151.

Tye, M. (2003). Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ullman, S. (1979). The Interpretation of Structure from Motion. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences, 203 (1153): 406-426.

Viera, G. (2019). The Fragmentary Model of Temporal Experience and the Mirroring Constraint. Philosophical Studies, 176 (1): 21-44.

Vroomen, J. & Keetels, M. N. (2010). Perception of Intersensory Synchrony: A Tutorial Review. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 72 (4): 871-884.

Watzl, S. (2013). Silencing the Experience of Change. Philosophical Studies, 165 (3): 1009-1032.

Welch, R. (1978). Perceptual Modification: Adapting to Altered Sensory Environments. New York: Academic Press.

Wu, W. (2011). Attention as Selection for Action. In C. Mole, D. Smithies, & W. Wu (Eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wu, W. (2014). Attention. Abingdon: Routledge.

174