Explanation in theories of the specious present

Abstract

Time-consciousness theories aim to explain what our experiences must be like so that we can experience change, succession, and other temporally extended events (or at least why we believe we have such experiences). The most popular and influential explanations are versions of theories of the specious present, which maintain that what we experience appears to us as temporally extended. However, the role that specious presents have in bringing about temporal experiences remains undescribed. The briefly mentioned suggestions maintain that having temporally extended experiential content is either necessary or sufficient for having temporal experiences, or that the contents provide input for separate perceptual processes. In this paper, I argue that none of these suggestions succeed. Consequently, the theories of the specious present have not provided a satisfactory explanation of temporal experiences and their central motivation is lost.