Memory and sensory experience are different in kind, not just in degree.
Many arguments in Consciousness Explained seem to be implicitly founded on blurring the distinction between the two -- mistakenly, in my arrogant opinion.
It follows from this distinction that we never remember vivid sensory experience. Instead, we remember sensory experience and assume that it was as vivid as the sensory experience of the present. If a demon were to claim that my past sensory experiences were less vivid than my present experience, I wouldn't be able to invoke my memories to counter the claim.
What about motion? Motion happens over time. Is motion experienced, or just remembered? The claim that motion is only remembered and not experienced sounds very wrong. But experience is of the present, and the present is static. I mean, it should be static. What would it be like to remember motion but never experience it?
There are three ways to process a stream. You can process it element by element, you can process it in chunks, or you can process it with a sliding window. Is it possible that the stream of consciousness is really a sliding window? This would imply that we subjectively live with two kinds of time...
Many arguments in Consciousness Explained seem to be implicitly founded on blurring the distinction between the two -- mistakenly, in my arrogant opinion.
It follows from this distinction that we never remember vivid sensory experience. Instead, we remember sensory experience and assume that it was as vivid as the sensory experience of the present. If a demon were to claim that my past sensory experiences were less vivid than my present experience, I wouldn't be able to invoke my memories to counter the claim.
What about motion? Motion happens over time. Is motion experienced, or just remembered? The claim that motion is only remembered and not experienced sounds very wrong. But experience is of the present, and the present is static. I mean, it should be static. What would it be like to remember motion but never experience it?
There are three ways to process a stream. You can process it element by element, you can process it in chunks, or you can process it with a sliding window. Is it possible that the stream of consciousness is really a sliding window? This would imply that we subjectively live with two kinds of time...
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