One way in which the idea of a limit to temporal experience figures in the molecularist’s picture comes out when we consider how the molecularist would respond to Broad’s argument, mentioned in section 2, above. Broad’s point, to reiterate, was that an account of temporal phenomenology needs to explain what the difference comes to between seeing that the hour hand of a clock has moved, and seeing the second hand moving. Suppose you stare at the hour hand of a (working) clock for half an hour. At the end of that period, the hand is in a position that you can clearly visually discriminate from the position it was in half an hour earlier, which you can recall from memory. Yet, despite staring at it for so long, you never perceived the movement of the hand. The molecularist explains this fact in terms of the idea of an upper temporal limit, a maximum duration that acts of temporal experience can span — in Lockwood’s (2005, p. 365) evocative phrase, we take in what is happening in “gulps”. The reason why you cannot see the movement of the hour hand is that (perhaps because of limits of attentional capacity) that duration is considerably shorter than half an hour, and indeed is shorter than the minimum period of time that it takes for the hour hand to travel between two positions that you can visually discriminate. Thus, even by staring at the clock for half an hour, you cannot change the fact that each of the individual experiences you will have during that time is actually much shorter, and that none of them is an experience as of the hour hand moving. In contrast, the second hand travels fast enough for you to visually discriminate several positions it traverses in the course of just one experience. That is why you can see the movement of the second hand. Thus, one central type of limit to temporal experience the molecularist will appeal to takes the form of an upper temporal limit to the duration such experience can span.
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