  The second worry is whether Broad’s model can secure the continuity of consciousness in a way that is acceptable to the realist. At the heart of Broad’s account are acts of sensing which apprehend temporally extended contents. Since in the case of a continuous stream of consciousness these acts form a dense continuum, there is no difficulty with ‘gaps’ in consciousness, and so Broad’s account meets the requirements of the Modest Continuity Thesis. It is not clear, however, that it meets the requirements of the Strong Continuity Thesis. To do so, Broad’s account must allow successive phases of a stream to be experienced as flowing into one another – it must make room for experiential connections between stream-phases – but this looks problematic. Returning to Figure 9, consider the extended act of sensing stretching from A1 to AN, and the extended act stretching from shortly after AN to A2, where AN (not shown in the figure) is roughly mid-way between A1 and A2. These two extended acts can be as close together in time we like, but they are nonetheless entirely distinct acts of awareness, and the two are not experientially connected. Hence the problem. It is true that the acts apprehend (in part) the same content, but it is not clear this suffices to forge the required experiential links. We can certainly stipulate that the acts concerned have the same subject, but in the absence of any compelling story as to how this secures phenomenal continuity it is not clear how this helps either. Nor is it clear that a viable account can be constructed if we remain faithful to the spirit of Broad’s approach. Suppose we were to hold that the acts [A1-AN] and [AN-A2] are unified by virtue of their both falling under a second-order act of awareness, an act which apprehends first-order acts (and their contents). Since the entire spread of content apprehended over the interval encompassed by A1 and A2 would be experienced together, the result would be phenomenologically unrealistic: the specious present would have twice the duration that it has in actuality. And the difficulties do not end here: for what unifies the second-order acts? As illustrated in Figure 10, if we take this route, we can easily end up with a situation in which the entire content of a stream of consciousness is apprehended as a single whole, by a single all-embracing act.