Must an Appearance of Succession Involve a Succession of Appearances?

A conscious experience – or, as I shall also call it, an appearance – as of a round blue object could exist in the absence of anything round or blue. An appearance as of an hour-long walk need not last more than several minutes – the appearance might be generated over the course of a brief period of REM sleep. Arguably, an appearance as of things arrayed in three-dimensional space could occur in a two-dimensional being, assuming that such a being could have the same functional organization as a normally operating human nervous system, and that having this functional organization is empirically sufficient for having the sort of conscious experience that humans normally have. Could an appearance as of events unfolding in succession exist in a being in which there occurred no succession of events? I do not know the answer to this question. But in what follows, I am going to argue for a claim that, if true, removes one of the main obstacles to answering it in the affirmative. This is the objection that an appearance as of succession must at least involve a succession of appearances – that, in order for me to have a conscious experience as of an earlier state of affairs followed by a later state of affairs, there must at least occur in me a temporal succession of conscious experiences, one corresponding to the apparently earlier state of affairs, another to the apparently later. Against this, I am going to argue that it is possible for a subject who has an experience as of succession to have this experience at a time, or over a period of time, during which there occurs in him no succession of conscious mental states at all. If this is correct, then it could appear to someone as if events were occurring in succession, one after another, even while his conscious state of mind remained entirely unchanged, with no gain or loss of phenomenal properties. But from this it does not obviously or automatically follow that an appearance as of succession could exist in the absence of