A Talk with Nicholas Humphrey: “Why ever should natural selection have gone to so much trouble to create a thick subjective present? Why don’t we let conscious time slip by like physical time does? What can be the biological advantage to us of experiencing our own presence in the world in this magically rich way?

So that’s what I’m working on now. And what I’m now thinking — though it certainly needs further work — is basically that the point of there being a phenomenally rich subjective present is that it provides a new domain for selfhood. Gottlob Frege, the great logician of the early 20th century, made the obvious but crucial observation that a first-person subject has to be the subject of something. In which case we can ask, what kind of something is up to doing the job? What kind of thing is of sufficient metaphysical weight to supply the experiential substrate of a self — or, at any rate, a self worth having? And the answer I’d now suggest is: nothing less than phenomenal experience — phenomenal experience with its intrinsic depth and richness, with its qualities of seeming to be more than any physical thing could be.” (The Edge)