Conscious experiences of change, from seeing a bird take flight to listening to a melody, cannot be broken down into ever smaller units of experience. They must inhabit what William James called the “specious present,” a sliding window of time where the immediate past and present overlap. Philosopher Lyu Zhou argues that this exposes a deep rift between mind and matter. When the physical world undergoes change, it does so through succession – one physical state replaces another, and the past is gone – whereas consciousness requires the active retention of the past inside the present, revealing its fundamentally non-physical nature.

1. Consciousness, change and time

You are now conscious as you read this article. Is your consciousness physical? Many today think it is. They claim that it either is a physical system made of matter – most likely the neural network of your brain – or is realized by matter through a physical process, most likely by your brain through a neural biochemical process. However, I hope to convince you that this view is wrong. I hope to show you that your immediate present consciousness has certain features that physical systems and processes cannot have.

What is so novel about my argument? The most often cited reason for denying that consciousness is physical is the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. The Hard Problem is that it is deeply mysterious how the physical process in your brain can give rise to subjective experiences with qualities such as what it is like to see red or smell the malodor of a long-rotten potato. The apparently intractable nature of this problem suggests that consciousness is likely not physical. But the problem I want to raise today is a different and novel one. Unlike the Hard Problem, which focuses on the qualitative aspect of consciousness, my argument highlights a certain structural feature of your immediate present consciousness that nothing physical could have: it is holistic. Let me explain.

No doubt you are currently experiencing some change, e.g. objects moving from one place to another. But what it is for there to be a change is simply for there to be different states at different times. Therefore, if you experience change at all, as you indeed do, you must experience there being different states at different times. The experience involved cannot be like a snapshot: it cannot be restricted to a mere instant. Rather, the experience must be like a short movie with a brief duration: it must have a temporal span so as to encompass different states at different times.

The snapshot conception of your immediate present consciousness faces at least one other serious problem. You seem to have a stream of consciousness in which various states come and pass away in time. These states appear before, after, or at the same time as one another along a temporal dimension that is very much like a continuous extended line. It is not without reason that it is often spoken of as a timeline. However, the sum of any number of zeros must remain zero. Likewise, the addition of any number of durationless instants—snapshot experiences—cannot give you any continuous extended timeline.

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Your immediate present consciousness is an extended whole: it is not like a snapshot, but like a short movie.

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