Summary and Conclusion

(a) Summary

(1) We have managed to assemble a set of properties of the experience, beginning with four logical properties. Thus, experience is:

A. An indefinable.

B. An essential property of all experience-individuals, and of some types which take experience form.

C. A genus kind, not a species kind, and hence incapable of satisfying the type-condition necessary for identity and being.

D. A non-contingent or necessarily actualized genus of the category, psychological.

These four logical properties were then augmented by the following non-logical properties. The experience is:

E. Occurrent in type: it is event/processive in character, and not of the type state.

F. If an experience is temporally extended, its constitution is purely processive and non-state in type.

G. There are no experience states.

And:

H. When experiences across time synthesize to constitute instances of experiential types, they are exhibiting the developmentally first form of occurrent memory.

And:

I. Experiences are veridically and indexically given to self-conscious subjects as temporally sited ‘now’.

J. And the experiential instant essentially relates to neighbouring other times.

K. So that an experiencing subject must be aware of the passage of time.

And I suppose we should add the following celebrated property:

L. In many cases (e.g. feeling nausea, seeing vermilion, being amused) there is something that is ‘what it is like’ to have the experience.

(2) Despite the formidableness of this list of properties, experiencehood is unanalysable, being an ‘original’ constituent of the mind. This is evidenced in the fact that our capacity to identify instances of the property outstrips our capacity to quote a justifying rationale. Does not our certainty that (say) some mental image is an experience, precede our ability to invoke a rationale? (A rationale that is inevitably open-ended.) And in any case numerous psychological indefinables, like belief/striving/sensation/etc., have known constitutive properties. Thus: belief is directed to propositions, strivings are experiences, sensations exhibit degree, etc. The existence of such properties can be no indicator of definability. And, one might ask, definability in terms of—what? Of more of the same ilk as itself? This suggestion carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. A principle to the effect that necessary constitutive properties must help constitute a definition of the covering concept, would defeat the whole idea of the mind as a system of diverse psychological types. Mental substance would drain away at a trice. Like Baron Münchausen's horse the mind would support its own weight! If necessary constitutive properties led automatically to definition, everything in the mind would be defined in terms of everything else, and all content vanish into thin air. Something must provide that content: presumably, indefinables of the like of belief and striving. Why not experience also?

(b) Conclusion

(1) I have spoken of the experiential sector of the mind: that is, all that holds and happens in a mind of non-experiential type. The multiple unbroken lines of memory running back through the mind to early childhood typify this relatively stable corpus. If anything merits the title ‘substance of the mind’, this must be its site, for all that gives to a mind a determinate character is non-experiential, since whatever mental characteristics one's mental history attests to finds its place here. Indeed, it may even be that we discover in this sector of the mind the grounds of its very identity.

Can a mind exist that has no mental character whatsoever, a mental tabula rasa without even the properties of waxor the ‘virgin page’? But whatever the truth on this matter, and on the need for a measure of stability, this domain can scarcely be ‘Parmenidean’, for it harbours continual change. And yet this sub-sector of the mind is like the rest of the World inasmuch as those changes are of states. And that in effect is to say, that events in this part of the mind are founded on what has no need of change or incident to be. This is borne out by the fact that the mind and

this sub-sector could in principle survive in complete stasis. All manifestations of mental life could cease, and they continue unscathed.

It is upon such a base that experience arises or ‘appears’. Here the picture is truly Heraclitean, all fire and motion with nothing with the potential for stasis in it, no states in the middle of the movement, no matter that burns so to say.

Experience appears in fluxon the surface of the mind, upon the relatively stable corpus without which it could not so much as exist. And while the quasi-substantival ground of experience continues in a steady necessarily unbroken line, experience comes and goes like the weather, being unable to exist without constant agitation. This is because each experiential instant looks beyond itself temporally, is like a window opening out onto both temporal corridors. And this in turn must be what renders unavailable to experience the type of autonomy that states necessitate and import. Thus, at any moment in time the experience is temporally both elsewhere and here in its content, for it cannot exist without progression, incident, movement. In this sense it is generally in advance of itself (though not in dreams), and more or less inevitably behind itself also, since experiences synthesize across time to realize the developmentally first form of occurrent short-term memory. There is no repose within consciousness. It either ‘goes on’, or destructs.

(2) Since occurrence is the stuff of experience, being all event and process in the absence of states, time enters constitutively into its make-up: the content of each experiential instant necessarily includes temporal properties. But in addition certain fundamental relations with time are realized uniquely for experiencing subjects. In particular, experience guarantees a direct confrontation with the passage of time, and in a sense that applies as much to the unselfconscious as the self-conscious.

This direct encounter with time was apparent in the two main temporal properties noted during the preceding discussion. I briefly repeat them here, the first in terms fitting only the self-conscious. Thus, we saw firstly that experiencing subjects know of each instant that it is the instant it is, at the very least in the indexical form of ‘now’, and that such knowledge is unavailable to non-experiencing beings. And secondly experiences proved to be of such a nature that the experiential instant essentially refers to other times—as the example of the rocket at night beautifully illustrates (or the equally convincing case of intentional action). In this sense the experiential instant is temporally given both for what it is itself, and in relation to neighbouring times. And in this way the passage of time is accessible uniquely to those who are experiencing.

What is the unselfconscious equivalent of these confrontations with time? Any experiencing animal has an awareness of the present, insofar as it has the capacity to distinguish one moment from another. We encounter this power in the most rudimentary of creatures. Thus, an insect might respond to a mating signal that took the form of three identical repeated brief emissions of light, the cue being to act at and

upon receipt of the third light. This creature perceives and acts selectively across time, and that alone is sufficient for it to be credited with temporal recognition. (And it is neither here nor there that its behaviour is instinctive.) The point is, that the creature here finds its way through time exactly as it does though space.

This is knowing the present instant when it ‘appears’—unselfconsciously. However, each instant is what it is, and is not its temporal neighbours. And so the capacity to recognize the present cannot be the same thing as what I have been calling the ‘co-presence’ of other times in the experiential instant. But this latter capacity also finds its unselfconscious form. We have merely to remember the importance to animal life of perceptually identifying continuities across time like mating dances or the movement-patterns of prey or predator. More centrally still, one could instance purposeful activity. In this experience we discover a relation to the future closely akin to that to the past in the above examples.

While a dog crossing the garden to dig up its bone is doubtless not actually thinking of that forthcoming event—unlike a human gourmet approaching some famous Parisian restaurant, he is not to be likened to an animal on a treadmill either. The mind of this creature is occupied by active processes which irreducibly point towards future events.

(3) A noteworthy absentee from this account of experience is space. Time seems to be centre-stage in the theory, space nowhere to be found. And there can be no doubt that time is the unique dimension upon which experiences are strung. Indeed, it seems to me that investigating consciousness reveals that time is closer to our essential nature than is space. An elucidation of the concept of experience looks at first blush as if it could proceed almost as if the mind had no essential need of space—perhaps illusorily. We sometimes think we just might be able to imagine a World containing consciousnesses without matter or space, even if we reject the idea on consideration. But we entertain no such ideas in the case of time. We simply know forthwith that we could not imagine consciousnesses without time. We know at once.

And it is experience that puts us in touch with time. I do not mean in the ‘what it is is like’-mode of ‘quales’. Rather, it does so in the sense that in experience we directly confront time in the several ways revealed in the discussion, which are tantamount to an awareness of the passage of time. After all, one cannot have knowledge of the reality of time without an awareness of its mutations. Finally, we saw that experiences do not just inhabit time, take up positions in time—which is true of absolutely all events (or for that matter states): time is their very stuff, insofar as they are constituted of the essentially temporal constituents, process and event, and of nothing else—being pure ‘flux’. Their development is not a mutation in time from something a-temporal in nature to something else a-temporal, it is uniquely from process-stage to process-stage, and thus it is not so much change as sheer incident. Experience may even be described as an ‘emergent’ or ‘higher’ kind of process, a ‘higher fire’ that can burn without fuel or substance. Where else in nature do we discover process in the absence of state?

This necessary agitation I have suggested is a direct manifestation of the vitality of the organism. It is an example of the ‘ticking over’ that is in a general sense essential to life. The mind, and the body, can in principle mimic death, at least in hypothetical states of suspended animation. But the realm of experience is necessarily incapable of such pretence, and so too a fortiori is consciousness itself. The forces of life are nakedly on display in this domain.