How the Continuity of Experience Could Disprove Materialism :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

T here(predicate) count to be three distinct questions about persistency. (1) Is experience continuous? (2) Is the corporeal world continuous? And (3) Are the physical events of the brain which give arise to experience continuous? Finding answers to these questions that can be integrated without contradiction is a ch whollyenge in itself. But before we ask whether our answers contradict, we mustiness respond to the questions. The most ambitious and unwieldy of these questions is without a doubt the second, regarding the continuity of the physical world. This question is the realm of philosophers alone, and it has been make outd since the beginning of thought. Heraclitus thought the world was in a constant democracy of continuous change, while Parmenides thought cartridge clip an illusion, laid out eternally and unchangingly. Today this debate has become cognise as that between the conventional possibleness of time and the block theory of time. (1) New names for th e two camps, however, cause provided no new answers, and the debate seems interminable. If the question of whether time in the physical world flows at all cannot be answered, it is certainly impossible to determine whether it flows continuously. Philosophy must here bow out to some degree and let psychology have its turn at bat. Aristotle writes Whether, if soul (mind) did not exist, time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked for if there cannot be some one to count there cannot be anything that can be counted... Aristotle is wise enough not to attempt to answer this question, but or else simply states that the answer depends on whether time exists countably in the absence of a perceiver. (2) Thus the ball is thrown very early in the plump for into the hands of psychologists and neurobiologists, and the question thus is transformed into the first of the three, regarding experience. William James advocated a model of experience with continual mental st ates, the stream of consciousness. He writes Consciousness, then, does not get along to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as chain or train do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed if flows. A river or a stream be the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. He explains that even when gaps seem to appear in the moments when we are aware of our awareness, such as when a aloud noise surprises us, even there exists some sort of mental state and thus a continuity of experience.