have a good reason to think that certain temporal parts are fully real, and perhaps
we have a good reason to think that cross-temporal fusions exist, but have not yet
produced an argument for the claim that cross-temporal fusions are themselves fully
real. Remember that we have some reason to reject the claim that fusions of fully
real things are always themselves fully real: the cases of mere aggregates or heaps,
mentioned earlier in this chapter, provide compelling counter-examples. We
shouldn’t immediately assume that fusions of fully real things are never themselves
fully real. But in the absence of an argument for the full reality of a given
object, perhaps our default assumption should be that it is not. On such a view, the
short-lived enjoyers of qualia are fully real, but (perhaps) nothing fully real persists
beyond them.
As far as I am aware, those foes of the doctrine of temporal parts who are moved by
the worry that on the doctrine of temporal parts nothing really persists are not
typically moved to argue that time itself is unreal in the sense that there are only
moments of time and no temporally larger object made out of these instances. Why
the asymmetry?
There is a plausible picture of the nature of time according to which the funda-
mental bearer of geometrical properties, broadly construed, is time itself.^35 (Or
better: space–time itself.) On this sort of view, parts of time (or space–time) have
their properties in virtue of being embedded in time (or space-time). Time (or space–
time) enjoys perfectly natural properties, but its proper parts do not. On this view,
time itself (or space–time) is a fundamental object, but perhaps its proper parts are
not. The view that space and time are metaphysically prior to spaces and times is a
fairly traditional view, and one way of explicating this priority is via the thought that
space and time are more real than spaces and times.
There are other views concerning persistence besides the doctrine of temporal
parts. Perhaps persons fare better if persons endure rather than perdure. There are
many ways to characterize endurantism, but here I will characterize it merely
negatively: something endures across an interval of timeIjust in case it occupies
some subregions ofIthat collectively composeI(or it occupiesIitself) but not in
virtue of there being some other temporally smaller objects that collectively occupy
those subregions. Enduring objects do not persist by virtue of anything like temporal
parts. And because of this fact, there is no temporal stand-in for the enduring object
to be the true bearer of qualia.
However, we shouldn’t assume that endurantism is the key proposition that will
allow one to move from the perfect naturalness of qualia to the full reality of people.
First, one could hold that qualia are not instantiated by persons, enduring or
otherwise, but rather by sub-personal proper parts of persons. This is an intriguing
possibility, perhaps suggested by so-called split-brain experiments. But set this aside.
(^35) This conception of the whole of space and time as prior to their parts appears in Kant even during his
critical period. See Kant (1999a: 175, A24–25/B39).