Essays on consciousness, space, time and space-time

My dissertation is a collection of three papers that each discuss the relationship between conscious experiences of spatio-temporal features of the world and how the physical realizers of the experiences are themselves organized in space and time.In "The Experience of Left and Right" I ask whether two subjects whose bodies are perfect mirror image duplicates of each other would necessarily have the same experiences. If they would, then we can argue that two subjects who start off life as mirror image duplicates would subsequently have "mirror inverted" experiences relative to each other. That is, one subject's experiences of world would be like those the other would have were they in a mirror-image copy of their actual environment. Surprisingly, it follows that an initially symmetrical subject would not have qualitatively distinct experiences of an object and a mirror image copy of the object.In "Snapshots, Inner Theaters and the Specious Present" I argue against a "Cinematic" conception of temporal experience. This is the idea that temporal features of the world are presented to us in experience in much the way that they are by the changing images on a movie screen - in particular, that experiences are extended events, and that the relations between the temporal parts of an experiences play a crucial role in fixing its temporal content. I give an empirical argument against this type of theory, and argue that a better alternative is a version of William James "Specious Present" view.In "Consciousness in a Space-Time World" I question whether intuitive views of the phenomenology of experiences are compatible with relativistic physics. The phenomenology of an experience seems to depend on its duration and how its parts are ordered in time. Yet its duration and some aspects of its ordering are frame-dependent, suggesting that phenomenology is itself frame-dependent. I explain why this is incompatible with some of our most deeply held beliefs about experience, and I consider a number of competing views of the space-time metaphysics of the stream that attempt to preserve these beliefs.