Laing, JA; (2017) On being in time: temporal consciousness and the consciousness of time. Masters thesis , UCL (University College London).

Abstract

Many philosophers have thought that for an experience to be an experience of succession, it must, in some sense, simultaneously present each apparent stage of the perceived succession. There are stronger and weaker versions of this idea. Recently, many have argued that temporally extended occurrences must be simultaneously experienced in a single, atomic experience, without undergoing a correspondingly extended experience. An alternative, weaker, way of understanding this claim , popular in the phenomenological tradition, is to insist that though our experience of change is itself a temporally extended, changing, phenomenon, each stage of that experience must involve a representation of what is currently happening in a temporal context of what preceded it and an anticipatory awareness of what is yet to come. I argue that once we acknowledge the possibility of a Holist view of temporal experience, on which short-lived phases of experience constitutively depend on longer episodes in the stream of consciousness, the arguments for each of these claims are indecisive. They do not provide convincing grounds for ruling out the following possibility: there is an experience such that this experience is an experience of change solely in virtue of being temporally extended, having a number of stages which present corresponding stages of the change experienced, and where these stages constitutively depend on the whole, temporally extended experience of which they are a part. Once this possibility is acknowledged, it becomes unclear to what extent we need to think that simultaneous awareness is ever involved in the experience of change.

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