The Stream of Consciousness: III. Adolf Grünbaum's Nowness

Abstract

Implicitly and later explicitly, James understood the stream of consciousness to consist of a sequence of temporally adjacent pulses of consciousness (except for time gaps when consciousness stops). Gibson claimed James's stream amounts to a stream of self-consciousness since it includes “a travelling moment of present time.” Reference to the present, according to Gibson, depends on the occurrence of an introspective kind of perceptual experience; that is, it does not occur if only straightforward perceptual experience is going on. Actually, this is not far from James's own view of the specious present, as I have explicated it. Grünbaum would add that the “occurring now” of a physical event requires that the individual have perceptual experience of the event together with a conceptualized awareness of this perceptual experience as occurring simultaneously with the conceptualized awareness of it. But, I ask, cannot perceptual experience itself intrinsically involve the attribute of nowness?