On Our Experience of Ceasing to Exist

In a recent article, J. D. Kiernan-Lewis has claimed that "it is evident that Nathan Oaldander has failed to understand both the analogy and the ontological point of the argument against tenselessness." The argument, which he believes is implicit in Prior's classic paper "Thank Goodness That's Over," is analogous to the arguments by Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson against physicalism. Thus, Kiernan-Lewis argues that the detenser's attempt to provide an ontological reduction of the experience of a headache ceasing to exist fails because it does not explain the subjective, first-person experience of what it is like for a headache to cease to exist. In this paper, I shall show that his argument against the tenseless theory of time is not, as he says, "ludicrously simple and quite decisive" but rather question-begging and unsound. In order to perspicuously uncover the errors I believe exist in KiemanLewis's argument against the detenser, I shall quote his statement of it at length: