each of us has an original feeling of selfhood from which our idea of selfhood derives.
Unfortunately, Home thought that this original feeling is not one that is constantly
possessed. Similarly, perhaps the feeling of being embodied is a persisting qualitative
experience that a person has throughout her existence.^32 But this also does not seem
to be the case, since we seem to continue to exist while in a dreamless slumber, and
I doubt that we feel embodied in these scenarios.^33
But set these worries aside. Even if we grant that there is a permanent sense of the
self or a permanent feeling of embodiment, and hence that some qualia can be
assigned directly to the whole persisting person rather than via their temporal
parts, there is still a further issue. Even if some qualia are perfectly natural, it is not
obvious that all of them are. Perhaps there are some qualia that supervene on other
qualia, and if so, we at least need a reason to think that the supervening qualia are
themselves perfectly natural, since they do not satisfy the principle for being perfectly
natural that I articulated earlier. I don’t know about a sense of the self, but the sense
of embodiment is a plausible candidate for being a quale that supervenes on other,
shorter-lived qualia. And in which case, it is not obviously fundamental, and if it is
not, it does us no good here.
So at most we have articulated an argument for the claim that proper temporal
parts of persons are fully real. But that proper temporal parts of persons might be
fully real is itself a troubling thought, especially in the absence of an argument that
persons are fully real. One of the earliest worries about the doctrine of temporal parts
seems to be that, on this view, nothing really persists: there are just short-lived
temporal parts. (This worry would be somewhat misguided as a response to the
weaker versions of the doctrine of temporal parts on which there could be temporally
extended objects without proper temporal parts.) Probably one source of this intu-
ition is the thought that composition is inherently a spatial relation in the sense that it
always relates things that are themselves spatially related to one another. If you have
this thought, it will be hard to see how there could be a composition relation that
takes in its domain objects existing at different, non-overlapping, times, and so hard
to see how there could be anything temporally extended. But, on this thought, there
would also be no way to build time out of time’s temporal parts either, and I think
this is one reason to reject this possible source of the intuition that on the doctrine of
temporal parts, nothing really persists.^34
But even if an (or even if the) original source of the intuition stems from a false
judgment about composition, something like that intuition might be right: perhaps we
(^32) I owe this suggestion to Jordan Dodd.
(^33) An extreme defender of a kind of psychological approach to personal identity could deny that we
exist while“in a dreamless slumber.”On this view, we are a temporally gappy fusion of psychologically
connected temporal parts. See Hudson (2001) for the articulation of this kind of view. 34
That said, Joshua Spencer has pointed out to me that, since there are many kinds of composition, the
intuition that spatial objects must be spatially related in order to stand intheir kind of compositionwould
not necessarily compromise moments of time from composingin a different waylonger intervals of time.