Specious Present, Phenomenal Extension, and Mereological Inversion: A Problem for Physicalism about the Mind

Abstract

The specious present (James, 1890/1950) is the phenomenal temporal structure of the representational content of my present experience. This article is a study of the mereological structure of the specious present and what it reveals about the nature of the mind. I argue that the specious present has certain features that cannot be easily explained within the framework of physicalism about the mind — the view that consciousness is nothing over and above what is physical. In particular, the specious present is a phenomenally extended (i.e.non-instantaneous) whole whose parts are conceptual abstractions and are therefore dependent on this whole. However, unlike the specious present, what is physical does not have this special property of the parts being dependent on the whole. Therefore, it is unclear how the specious present can be explained in physicalistic terms.