The other day I walked into the kitchen to see the following mundane happenings:
1) Daughter sitting at the kitchen counter eating a snack out of a bowl.
2) Wife sitting on a kids chair with son in lap, clipping his toenails.
These were about 8 feet apart. I casually looked at one, then the other, then back again, and got a flash of revulsion at having just seen my daughter casually clipping and eating toenails!
This incorrect impression instantly resolved. The higher level aspects of these two distinct happenings were briefly entangled. There are many ways to explain this, two come to my mind:
1) On foveating an event, the higher-level contents (recognizing-what-is-happening) are present in my experience, but on looking away, they are reduced and only a vague 'pointer' is retained (so that I can look back at the interesting event to re-experience the full thing). In this case, the reduction was delayed or incomplete, so that when I looked at one event, the previously foveated one was still in-mind, and so they briefly overlapped. Since the higher-level contents are strongly enforced by the lower-level contents, which are completely forced by the retinal input, the intermingling was brief and the 'correct' contents survived.
2) Different events can simultaneously be in experience, but they are normally cordoned off from one another. In this case, the cordon was briefly broken and the two sets of high-level contents were mixed - maybe from one leaking into the other.
I think that 1) is the more likely alternative. I doubt that multiple sets of high-level contents can be simultaneously experienced, since they inevitably will sometimes involve common contents (in this case, both would have involved 'person/child/fingers/kitchen/etcetc'), and so would naturally be inextricable. Instead, my impression that I can simultaneously entertain different sets of high-level contents must instead be due to keeping one set in detail, the object of attention, while the other is reduced to something more like a pointer which can be quickly grabbed by attention to reconstitute the whole set.
