  But perhaps the situation is not quite so straightforward. Someone might object: ‘There cannot be an experience of succession without genuine succession, and the latter consists of the coming into being of successive phases of a stream of consciousness.’ If this view could be shown to be correct, the Growing Block theorist would have the upper hand. For if reality as a whole comes into being, drop by drop (or slice by slice), then so too does experience, and the experience of succession would thereby be possible. Of course, the viability of this line of argument depends on the initial premise: does the experience of succession require absolute becoming? Retentionalists will reject this entirely, holding as they do that experienced succession occurs within momentary slices of consciousness. Extensionalists can also question the premise. If the Extensional conception of Jamesian ‘duration-blocks’ expounded earlier were along the right lines, then experienced succession would be an intrinsic phenomenal feature of temporally extended experiences, and as such would not require the successive coming-into-being of experiential phases. Also, the earlier and later phases of a duration-block are experienced together (they are diachronically co-conscious), and it is by no means obvious that this relationship requires absolute becoming; indeed, it is more naturally construed as a connection between experiential phases which exist at neighbouring  times.[27]