Temporal Experience

Neural activity varies continually from moment to moment. Such temporal variability (TV) has been highlighted as a functionally specific brain property playing a fundamental role in cognition. We sought to investigate the mechanisms involved in TV changes between two basic behavioral states, namely having the eyes open (EO) or eyes closed (EC) in vivo in humans. To these ends we acquired BOLD fMRI, ASL, and [18F]-fluoro-deoxyglucose PET in a group of healthy participants (n = 15), along with BOLD fMRI and (...) [18F]-flumazenil PET in a separate group (n = 19). Focusing on an EO- vs EC-sensitive region in the occipital cortex (identified in an independent sample), we show that TV is constrained in the EO condition compared to EC. This reduction is correlated with an increase in energy consumption and with regional GABAA receptor density. This suggests that the modulation of TV by behavioral state involves an increase in overall neural activity that is related to an increased effect from GABAergic inhibition in addition to any excitatory changes. These findings contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying activity variability in the human brain and its control. (shrink)

Patient suffering of major depressive disorder (MDD) often complain that subjective time seems to “drag” with respect to physical time. This may point toward a generalized dysfunction of temporal processing in MDD. In the present study, we investigated temporal preparation in MDD. “Temporal preparation” refers to an increased readiness to act before an expected event; consequently, reaction time should be reduced. MDD patients and age-matched controls were required to make a saccadic eye movement between a central and an eccentric visual (...) target after a variable duration preparatory period. We found that MDD patients produced a larger number of premature saccades, saccades initiated prior to the appearance of the expected stimulus. These saccades were not temporally controlled; instead, they seemed to reflect reduced inhibitory control causing oculomotor impulsivity. In contrast, the latency of visually guided saccades was strongly influenced by temporal preparation in controls; significantly less so, in MDD patients. This observed reduced temporal preparation in MDD was associated with a faster decay of short-term temporal memory. Moreover, in patients producing a lot of premature responses, temporal preparation to early imperative stimuli was increased. In conclusion, reduced temporal preparation and short-term temporal memory in the oculomotor domain supports the hypothesis that temporal processing was altered in MDD patients. Moreover, oculomotor impulsivity interacted with temporal preparation. These observed deficits could reflect other underlying aspects of abnormal time experience in MDD. (shrink)

Let a smooth experience be an experience with perfectly gradual changes in phenomenal character. Consider, as examples, your visual experience of a blue sky or your auditory experience of a rising pitch. Do the phenomenal characters of smooth experiences have continuous or discrete structures? If we appeal merely to introspection, then it may seem that we should think that smooth experiences are continuous. This paper (1) uses formal tools to clarify what it means to say that an experience is continuous (...) or discrete, and (2) develops a discrete model of the phenomenal characters of smooth experiences. As a result, I'll argue that introspection leaves open whether smooth experiences are continuous or discrete. Yet I’ll also argue—perhaps surprisingly—that the discrete theory may better fit our introspective evidence. (shrink)

This study expands on past deceleration and slow consumption research by introducing and validating a measure of need-for-deceleration, an individual's motivational ability to engage in activities aimed at slowing down the perceived fast passage of time. Following initial scale development, two studies establish construct validity by placing need-for-deceleration into a nomological network. Results indicate that the measure correlated with, but was distinct from, variables involving negative affective states, such as state anxiety and neuroticism. Need-for-deceleration scores were not related to materialism, (...) but negatively correlated with self-efficacy, life satisfaction, work-life balance, and conscientiousness. Correlations were positive with need-for-uniqueness, future time orientation, and susceptibility to normative influence. Need-for-deceleration was also associated with regulatory focus (positively with prevention, and negatively with promotion focus). To explore criterion validity, a third study establishes associations between need-for-deceleration and consumer lifestyle variables. Developing and validating the scale can help researching and managing products relating to the consumption of time, wellness, mindfulness, and simplicity. (shrink)

If God exists atemporally, could God still be temporally conscious? This article aims to clarify a conceptual space for a divine temporal mode of consciousness under the traditional assumption that God exists atemporally. I contend that an atemporally existing and conscious God – by the divine nature, and not just the human nature in Christ – could also be conscious of the temporal world – and indeed, all possible temporal worlds – through a temporal mode that is akin to human (...) temporal consciousness, albeit exempt from its limitations. I submit that although (a) God exists atemporally (ontological atemporalism), (b) God could be both temporally and atemporally conscious (bimodalism of divine consciousness), and (c) these two modes of consciousness could be unified in an absolute divine consciousness without incurring schizophrenia-like problems (unity of bimodal divine consciousness). (shrink)

When entering an environment, animals – including humans – tend to consult their memories to determine what they know about the place. This information is useful to determine: is this place safe? And what happens next? In this chapter, we argue on both empirical and conceptual grounds that memory is largely organized by space. Spatial relations determine what is recalled and which experiences are combined in generalizations. Time does not play an analogous role. We show that space and time in (...) memory are thus deeply asymmetrical. We conclude with a consequence of our view: spatial organization entails a basic form of abstraction in a way temporal organization does not, and so the spatial organization of memory reveals that memory involves generalization from the very beginning. (shrink)

According to componential theories of emotional experience, emotional experiences are phenomenally complex in that they consist of experiential parts, which may include cognitive appraisals, bodily feelings, and action tendencies. These componential theories face the problem of emotional unity: Despite their complexity, emotional experiences also seem to be phenomenologically unified. Componential theories have to give an account of this unity. We argue that existing accounts of emotional unity fail and that instead emotional unity is an instance of experienced causal‐temporal unity. We (...) propose that felt emotional unity arises from our experience of the temporal‐causal order of the world. (shrink)

What makes us persons? Is it our bodies, our minds, or our consciousness? For centuries, philosophers have sought to answer these questions. While some believe humans are physical or biological, others claim we have an immaterial soul. This book proposes a new alternative. Selves were formed in evolution through connections and commitments to others when early hominins lived in tribal groups and developed languages. As humans learned to fulfill these commitments, they not only cultivated relationships but also created their personal (...) identities. Their habits of responsibility established their characters and therefore their reputations within their communities. This naturalistic approach proposes that a self is defined by the history of its commitments to cultural and personal norms. While brain processes are required, the self is not some internal, private mind but primarily a role within its community. As technology advances, selfhood could in the future be enabled by electronic, quantum, or other non-biological means. So if a self is formed through norms, could artificial intelligence evolve to have self-identity? (shrink)

Perceptual experience strikes us as a presentation of the here and now. I argue that it also involves experience of the past. This claim is often made based on cases, like seeing stars, involving significant signal-transmission lag, or based on how working memory allows us to experience extended events. I argue that the past is injected into perceptual experience via a third way: long-term memory traces in sensory circuits. Memory, like the receptor-based senses, is an integrated and constituent modality through (...) which we experience the environment. Because of this modality, we experience the sensed properties of stimuli partly as they are now, but also partly as we encountered them in the past. (shrink)

Presentism is, roughly, the ontological view that only the present exists. Among the philosophers engaged in the metaphysics of time there is wide agreement that presentism is intuitive (or commonsensical) and that its intuitiveness counts as evidence in its favour. My contribution has two purposes: first, defending the view that presentism is intuitive from some recent criticisms; second, putting forth a genealogical (or debunking) argument aimed at depriving presentism’s intuitiveness of the evidential value commonly granted to it.

The methodological differences of understanding, versus explaining, have been at the centre of a century-long methodenstreit debate (and disagreement) among philosophers and scientists. Karl Jaspers managed to import this discussion to the realm of psychiatry and psychopathology in a significant, but unresolved, manner. Side-tracked by the advent of various changes in psychiatry during the 20th century, phenomenology and philosophy of psychiatry have made a comeback in the last decades and, since then, developed new contributions to this subject. Quite similarly, the (...) study of time experience, standing on the shoulders of notorious philosophers, has too witnessed a similar renaissance, with groundbreaking developments across several conditions, including depression. The present essay is essentially exploratory, but during its development, after addressing the concepts of the methodenstreit debate, and tackling both meaningful and causal connections behind time dysperception in depression, I argue that understanding, at least in this context and at present time, is not entirely reducible to causal explanations, for some things are only gained in understanding, such as the feeling of being understood and the implications it carries for a therapeutic relationship and the treatment plan. (shrink)

Gruber and Smith (2019) have conducted some interesting virtual reality (VR) experiments, but we think that these experiments fail to illuminate why people think that the present is special. Their experiments attempted to test a suggestion by Hartle (2005) that with VR one might construct scenarios in which people experience the same present twice. If that’s possible, then it could give us a reason to think that when we experience the present as being special, that’s not because it’s objectively so. (...) Instead, our experience of the present being special is a feature of having a psychology like ours. While we are sympathetic to the thought that there is no objective present, we do not think that these experiments give us a reason to think this. That said, VR experiments, such as Gruber and Smith’s, hold much promise for being able to illuminate various aspects of our temporal psychology.According to Hartle’s (2005) IGUS model (which is meant to resemble entities like us) sensory information is routed to two kinds of processes: conscious processes C, which cause behavior, and unconscious processes, U, which construct a schematic representation of the environment. Hartle proposed that we experience the present as being special because of the sensory information at a time entering into C. For Gruber et al. (2020), the succession of sensory information entering into C underpins our experience of time passing. Our experience of time passing is illusory because it fails to be verid... (shrink)

This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experience in order to (...) make sense of the place of mind in nature. To achieve this goal, I introduce and defend the pathological complexity thesis as both a framework for the scientific investigation of consciousness and as a lifemind continuity thesis about the origins and function of consciousness. (shrink)

This chapter on classical empiricism is divided into three sections, namely, absolutism, idealism, and memory. Presentism poses a particular problem for the empiricist view that the idea of time arises from people's experience of the succession of their ideas. The view that time passes independently of the succession of ideas was shared by canonically empiricist philosophers, such as Gassendi, Locke, and Newton. The idea of time arises from a compound impression that consists of successively disposed simple impressions – impressions that (...) may be identical in all respects but for their manner of disposition, and that may be disposed on either side of an unoccupied gap. People's experience is not confined to the present moment. The truly radical implication is that the past is not destroyed. It persists, not into the present by way of a trace or echo, but in the past, which continues to be visible to consciousness. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, many philosophers in America thought that time should be taken seriously in one way or another. George P. Adams (1882-1961) argued that the past, present and future are all real but only the present is actual. I call this theory ‘actualist eternalism’. In this paper, I articulate his novel brand of eternalism as one piece of his metaphysical system and I explain how he argued for the view in light of the best explanations of temporal (...) experience and the present. I argue that his exploitation of analogies between time and modality offer some lessons for current debates about time such as the importance of providing a temporal epistemology. I also extract what I call the temporal boundary problem and argue that it gives rise to an unaddressed challenge for presentists and growing block theorists. (shrink)

The similarities between William James’ Stream of Consciousness and Henri Bergson’s La durée réelle have often been noted. Both emphasize the fundamentally temporal nature of our conscious experience and its constant flow. However, in this article, I argue that despite surface similarities between the OP theories, they are fundamentally different. The ultimate reason for the differences between the theories is that James believed that we should reject psychological explanations that depend on synthesis within the mental sphere. This is because such (...) explanations are incompatible with empiricism. Instead, we should look to the physiological mechanisms underpinning mental states. In contrast, Bergson was an adamant defender of a form of mental processing which he called qualitative synthesis. Duration itself, for Bergson, is a form of qualitative synthesis. However, in 1906, less than five years before James died, Bergson convinced him to change his mind. This results in a huge shift in James’ thought. Unless we understand how far apart James and Bergson were prior to this shift, we will not have a proper picture of the full influence of Bergson on James’ thought, nor of the major changes to James’ philosophy that occurred near the end of his life. (shrink)

Deconstruction and duration are arguably the two most important theories of time to emerge from French philosophy in the twentieth century. Yet, despite the resurgence of interest in Bergson, scholars have ignored Derrida’s own discussions of Bergson, both positive and negative, throughout his career. This lack of attention obscures an important influence on Derrida’s early thought, and hampers our ability to understand the nature of Derrida’s relationship to fields such as new materialism, posthumanism, and affect studies, that frequently turn to (...) Bergson for inspiration. This paper addresses this gap by tracking Derrida’s readings of Bergson and comparing two related pairs of their concepts: duration and différance, and intuition and spacing. The paper concludes by arguing that Derrida’s critical engagement with Bergson leads to an anti-presentist model of life, which gains new relevance in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

My dissertation puts forward a critique of the phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT). According to standard accounts of PIT, all genuine intentionality is either identical to or partly grounded in phenomenal consciousness. I argue that it is a conceptually significant mistake to construe conscious experiences in terms of token mental states that instantiate phenomenal properties. This mistake is predicated on ignoring an important difference in the temporal character—what I call the “temporal shape”—between states and properties as opposed to conscious experiences. States (...) and properties lack a temporal shape, but conscious experience has a temporal shape. Thus, in order to adequately capture our phenomenology of temporality we need a mental ontology that adequately reflects this distinction. A second aim of this dissertation is to defend a mereological account of phenomenal intentionality, which says that phenomenality and intentionality are related by being proper parts of a first-personal, subjective, mental event. On this approach, the conditions of satisfaction for a subject’s first-personal, subjective, mental event just are the conditions of satisfaction for phenomenal intentionality. I explore the theoretical grounds for a mereological account of phenomenal intentionality and conclude that it does a better job of explaining difficult cases like the problem of unconscious thought (e.g., your belief that “grass is green”). Thus, we have prima facie support for a mereological account of phenomenal intentionality exactly where competing accounts fail. (shrink)

Many philosophers and physicists have come to believe that the human experience of time and time as described by physics are incommensurable. Some claim that temporal experience is not veridical or does not even exist. Others claim that theories such as relativity or thermodynamics are faulty. In this paper, we demonstrate how human temporal experience and these theories can be seen as compatible. When relativity and thermodynamics are applied locally, the incompatibility becomes vanishingly small. We interpret the human experience of (...) the neuropsychologically defined specious present within the special and general theories of relativity using causal bicones and the Newtonian limit. We then expand this interpretation to include the human experience of transience and the past-present-future arrow of time. Finally, we explain how the human experience of the thermodynamic arrow, self-organizing systems arrow, and epistemological arrow of time is consistent with the physics of these arrows. (shrink)

Kant officially argues that the role of the representation of time in the synthetic a priori judgments of arithmetic and the general theory of motion implies that time must be an a priori condition...

While we perceive events in our environment through multiple sensory systems, we nevertheless perceive all of these events as occupying a single unified timeline. Time, as we perceive it, is unified. I argue that existing accounts of the perceived unity of time fail. Instead, the perceived unity of time must be constructed by integrating our initially fragmented timekeeping capacities. However, existing accounts of multimodal integration do not tell us how this might occur. Something new is needed. I finish the paper (...) by articulating the hurdles that must be overcome to provide an account of the perceived unity of time. (shrink)

This article formulates the “enigma of time” as the paradoxical compatibility between the apparent completeness of a temporal object’s presence and the actual incompleteness of its manifestation. Proceeding with the methodological assumption that this paradox cannot be “solved” by positing an atemporal foundation, I point to a constant risk in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology that the temporality of temporal phenomena is traced to an atemporal activity arranging equally atemporal contents—and thereby is explained away rather than explained. The risk was already recognizable (...) in the “schematic model” of apprehension, and it persisted in the foundationalist interpretation of “absolute time-consciousness.” By contrast, I suggest a hermeneutics that takes time seriously, which comprehends the paradox and make it the productive core of philosophizing. Only in this way can time cease to be a petrifying impasse and instead redefine the landscape of philosophy. (shrink)

This article formulates the “enigma of time” as the paradoxical compatibility between the apparent completeness of a temporal object’s presence and the actual incompleteness of its manifestation. Proceeding with the methodological assumption that this paradox cannot be “solved” by positing an atemporal foundation, I point to a constant risk in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology that the temporality of temporal phenomena is traced to an atemporal activity arranging equally atemporal contents—and thereby is explained away rather than explained. The risk was already recognizable (...) in the “schematic model” of apprehension, and it persisted in the foundationalist interpretation of “absolute time-consciousness.” By contrast, I suggest a hermeneutics that takes time seriously, which comprehends the paradox and make it the productive core of philosophizing. Only in this way can time cease to be a petrifying impasse and instead redefine the landscape of philosophy. (shrink)

In this work we present an epistemic analysis of time phenomenon using the mathematical machinery of information theory and modular theory. By adopting limited commitment to the ontology of time evolution, and instead by mainly relying on the information that is in principle accessible to the observer, we find that the most primary aspect of the temporal experience, the perceived distinctiveness across the states of the world, emerges as a purely epistemic function. By analyzing the mathematical properties of this epistemic (...) function, we interpret it to be in principle insensitive to any ontic state of the world, which leads to the conclusion that the observer is subject to temporal experience irrespective of whether the underlying state of the world is dynamical or invariant. On the ground of the presented analysis, we also provide a solution to the conceptual challenge of non-equilibrium phenomena that faces the thermal time hypothesis. (shrink)

F. Brencio (2021) [in Italian and English] (ed.), Dal corpo oggetto alla mente incarnata - From the object body to the embodied mind, in “InCircolo – Rivista di Filosofia e Culture”, 11, ISSN 2531-4092.

"This unique text develops an original theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between trauma and time by combining phenomenological and psychoanalytical traditions. Moving beyond Western psychoanalytical and phenomenological traditions, this volume presents new perspectives on the assessment and treatment of trauma patients. Powerfully illustrating how the temporal dimension of a patient's symptoms has until now been overlooked, the text presents a wealth of research literature to deepen our understanding of how trauma disrupts individual temporal experience. Ultimately, the resulting phenomena that (...) occur, positions time as a transdiagnostic psychological dimension, closely connected to the subject's sense of self. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and trauma and dissociation studies more broadly. Those specifically interested in the philosophy of the mind, Freud, and psychotherapy will also benefit from this book. Selene Mezzalira has completed PhDs in Philosophy and Clinical Psychology at the University of Padova, Italy, and Ryokan College, USA respectively. She has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the city of New York and at the University of California, Irvine, USA"--. (shrink)

Susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion (RHI) varies. To date, however, there is no consensus explanation of this variability. Previous studies, focused on the role of multisensory integration, have searched for neural correlates of the illusion. But those studies have failed to identify a sufficient set of functionally specific neural correlates. Because some evidence suggests that frontal α power is one means of tracking neural instantiations of self, we hypothesized that the higher the frontal α power during the eyes-closed resting (...) state, the more stable the self. As a corollary, we infer that the more stable the self, the less susceptible are participants to a blurring of boundaries—to feeling that the rubber hand belongs to them. Indeed, we found that frontal α amplitude oscillations negatively correlate with susceptibility. Moreover, since lower frequencies often modulate higher frequencies, we explored the possibility that this might be the case for the RHI. Indeed, some evidence suggests that high frontal α power observed in low-RHI participants is modulated by δ frequency oscillations. We conclude that while neural correlates of multisensory integration might be necessary for the RHI, sufficient explanation involves variable intrinsic neural activity that modulates how the brain responds to incompatible sensory stimuli. (shrink)

Experience is the most primitive kind of intentional contact with reality. Metaphysical inquiry is one of the heights of human thought. It would not be surprising if experience was often silent on metaphysics, failing to offer support to one metaphysical disputant over the other, forcing them to fall back on nonexperiential considerations. I argue that the dispute between A- and B-theorists about time is a dispute about which experience is silent. B-theorists have typically conceded that the manifest image of time (...) conflicts with how time turns out to be, on their own view of time. They have offered an array of accounts of why that conflict should not worry us. I argue here that these accounts are unconvincing. I also argue that they are unnecessary. Nothing about how time is experienced conflicts with B-theory. An independently plausible method for discovering what properties experience represents—the method of phenomenal contrast—implies that experience does not favor A-theory over B-theory. (shrink)

Currently, anomalous lived temporality is not included in the main diagnostic criteria or standard symptom checklists. In this article, we present the Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, a structured interview that can be used by researchers and clinicians without a comprehensive phenomenological background to explore abnormal time experiences in persons with abnormal mental conditions regardless of their diagnosis. When extensive data gathered by this scale are available, it will be possible to delineate well-defined anomalous lived temporality profiles for each psychopathological (...) disorder. This instrument may also prove useful for clinicians by providing a more refined assessment of relevant psychopathological symptoms and an in-depth understanding of the patient’s abnormal behaviour as related to specific types of time experience. In the first part of the article, we provide a brief overview of the phenomenological concept of temporality, including pre-phenomenal and phenomenal time, synthesis, conation and synchronization, and of abnormal time experiences in persons affected by psychopathological conditions. In the following part, we describe the basic structure of the interview that comprises seven categories corresponding to the abnormal features of lived temporality: anomalies of synchrony, of time structure, of implicit time flow, of explicit time flow, and anomalous experiences of the past, the present and the future. The paper also includes a section on administration and scoring of the TATE scale, the complete interview and a Likert table for quantifying the frequency, intensity and interference with daily life of the phenomena explored. (shrink)

A widespread (and often tacit) assumption is that fear is an anticipatory emotion and, as such, inherently future-oriented. Prima facie, such an assumption is threatened by cases where we seem to be afraid of things in the past: if it is possible to fear the past, then fear entertains no special relation with the future—or so some have argued. This seems to force us to choose between an account of fear as an anticipatory emotion (supported by pre-theoretical intuitions as well (...) as empirical research in psychology) and admitting cases of past-oriented fear. In this paper, we argue for a proposal that dissolves this dilemma. Our claim is: with the right account in place, the future-orientation of fear can be made compatible with, and is actually explanatory of, cases where we are genuinely afraid of something in the past. So, there is no need to choose: fear is still future-oriented, even when we are genuinely afraid of things in the past. The key is a correct understanding of what fear’s temporal orientation amounts to, and the framework we offer here provides us with such an understanding. (shrink)

An examination of the specifically graphic-novelistic strategies employed in Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir, Maus, in leading the reader into a punctuated experience of time and memory, and in forcing complicity with the novel's problematic animal-as-ethnicity metaphor, in a wider attempt at putting together the critical vocabulary for discussing comic books as simultaneously textual and pictorial ‘texts’.

The philosophical investigation of perceptual illusions can generate fruitful insights in the study of subjective time consciousness. However, the way illusions are interpreted is often controversial. Recently, proponents of the so-called dynamic snapshot theory have appealed to the Waterfall Illusion, a kind of motion aftereffect, to support a particular view of temporal consciousness according to which experience is structured as a series of instantaneous snapshots with dynamic qualities. This dynamism is meant to account for familiar features of the phenomenology of (...) time, such as succession, continuity, and change. Previous theories have typically appealed to a subjective present occupying an interval of time; that is, a “specious present.” I argue, through analysis of motion aftereffect illusions and the rare condition of akinetopsia, i.e. motion-blindness, that the Waterfall Illusion fails to support the dynamic snapshot theory as intended. Furthermore, I suggest that future theories of subjective time should see temporal phenomenology as the result of non-localised processes closely tied to the mechanism underlying consciousness generally. (shrink)

Extensionalist theories of the specious present suggest that every perceptual experience is extended in time for a short while, such that they are co-extensive in time with the time experienced in them. Thus, there can be no experience of time, unless the experience itself is extended in time. Accordingly, there must be something that unites the temporal parts of a perceptual experience into temporally extended wholes. I call this the “glue-problem for extensionalism”. In this paper I suggest three desiderata that (...) an extensionalist theory should meet in order to solve the glue-problem. I also distinguish between different versions of extensionalism, and argue that none of them can solve the glue-problem without violating at least one desideratum. (shrink)

There is an eminent tradition of thought that sees in the phenomenon of time something contradictory. This tradition has been recently revived by some contemporary proponents of dialethism – the view that there are true contradictions. In this paper, I will contribute to this line of thinking by tracing the first steps of a dialethic account of time-consciousness. In particular, I will argue that the experiential flow of time can be accounted for in the framework of an intentionalist approach to (...) temporal perception if we conceive of time-consciousness as a quasi-multiplicity, i.e., a multiplicity of non-self-identical parts, hence the embrace of dialethism. Section 1 introduces dialethism, discusses Priest's dialethic theory of motion and time, and motivates the project of a dialethic account of time-consciousness. Section 2 introduces the intentionalist approach to time-consciousness and distinguishes pure intentionalism from sense-data intentionalism; both subscribes to a certain Principle of Simultaneous Awareness but interprets it differently. In Sect. 3, I offer an in-depth analysis of this principle and identify its core as the requirement of self-unification, i.e., the requirement that time-consciousness unifies itself in flowing without any higher-order act of unification. Section 4 then argues that pure intentionalism can satisfy this requirement by embracing dialethism. I conclude by noting how the dialethic account of time-consciousness incorporates a central extensionalist insight within an intentionalist outlook. (shrink)

Memories often come with a feeling of pastness. The events we remember strike us as having occurred in our past. What accounts for this feeling of pastness? In his recent book, Memory: A self-referential account, Jordi Fernández argues that the feeling of pastness cannot be grounded in an explicit representation of the pastness of the remembered event. Instead, he argues that the feeling of pastness is grounded in the self-referential causal content of memory. In this paper, I argue that this (...) account falls short. The representation of causal origin does not by itself ground a feeling of pastness. Instead, I argue that we can salvage the temporal localization account of the feeling of pastness by describing a form of egocentric temporal representation that avoids Fernández’s criticisms. (shrink)

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav describes the tzaddik as experiencing time in a distinctive, enlightened way: What is seventy years for the rest of us feels like a mere fifteen minutes for the tzaddik. Furthermore, even higher levels of enlightenment are possible—for a tzaddik on a higher level, what feels like seventy years for the first tzaddik is again but a mere fifteen minutes. This pattern continues, approaching a limit point which Rabbi Nachman calls “above time,” and which is the perspective (...) on time of the Divine. How might Rabbi Nachman’s claims about enlightened temporal experience be understood? In this paper, my aim is to examine some ways of understanding what it might mean to ‘experience time more quickly’ or to ‘experience 70 years as 15 minutes’ in light of contemporary theories of the structure of temporal experience. I then present a novel interpretation of Rabbi Nachman’s claims which appeals to the contemporary notion of the specious present —a nonzero temporal interval experienced in a unified way as present. (shrink)

The goal of perception is to infer the most plausible source of sensory stimulation. Unisensory perception of temporal order, however, appears to require no inference, since the order of events can be uniquely determined from the order in which sensory signals arrive. Here we demonstrate a novel perceptual illusion that casts doubt on this intuition: in three studies (N=607) the experienced event timings are determined by causality in real-time. Adult observers viewed a simple three-item sequence ACB, which is typically remembered (...) as ABC (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2016), in line with principles of causality. When asked to indicate the time at which events B and C occurred, points of subjective simultaneity shifted so that the assumed cause B appeared earlier and the assumed effect C later, despite full attention and repeated viewings. This first demonstration of causality reversing perceived temporal order cannot be explained by post-perceptual distortion, lapsed attention, or saccades. (shrink)

An increasing number of people worldwide are living with chronic conditions that have an aspect of bodily fragility as part of the condition or as an effect of treatment. In this article, I explore the temporal experience of bodily fragility and the particularities of consciousness states among people with the chronic condition osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) in Denmark. My aim is threefold. First, my goal is to give an insight into life with OI, a rare and rarely studied condition. Second, I (...) shed light on bodily fragility, a theme that lives in the shadows of other analytical foci in anthropology. Third, I will contribute to the anthropological understanding of the connection among body, physical environment, and consciousness. I argue that the lifeworlds of people with OI are haunted by mental and bodily memories and fearful future scenarios, which makes the past and the future collapse into the present. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated that duration of implied motion (IM) was dilated, whereas hMT+ activity related to perceptual processes on IM stimuli could be modulated by their motion coherence. Based on these findings, the present study aimed to examine whether subjective time perception of IM stimuli would be influenced by varying coherence levels. A temporal bisection task was used to measure the subjective experience of time, in which photographic stimuli showing a human moving in four directions (left, right, toward, or (...) away from the viewer) were presented as probe stimuli. The varying coherence of these IM stimuli was manipulated by changing the percentage of pictures implying movement in one direction. Participants were required to judge whether the duration of probe stimulus was more similar to the long or short pre-presented standard duration. As predicted, the point of subjective equality was significantly modulated by the varying coherence of the IM stimuli, but not for no-IM stimuli. This finding suggests that coherence level might be a key mediating factor for perceived duration of IM images, and top-down perceptual stream from inferred motion could influence subjective experience of time perception. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the inherent temporal orientation of fear, a matter on which philosophers seem to have contrasting opinions. According to some, fear is inherently present-oriented; others instead maintain that it is inherently future-oriented or that it has no inherent temporal orientation at all. Despite the differences, however, all these views seem to understand fear’s temporal orientation as one-dimensional—that is, as uniquely determined by the represented temporal location of the intentional object of fear. By contrast, we present a (...) view that introduces a two-dimensional account of fear’s temporal orientation. On such a view, we can say that fear is inherently future-oriented, independently of its being about something in the present or in the future. (shrink)

The mental representation of brief temporal durations, when assessed in standard laboratory conditions, is highly accurate. Here we show that adding or subtracting temporal durations systematically results in strong and opposite biases, namely over-estimation for addition and under-estimation for subtraction. The difference with respect to a baseline temporal reproduction task changed across durations in an operation-specific way and survived correcting for the effect due to operation sign alone, indexing a reliable signature of arithmetic processing on time representation. A second experiment (...) replicated these findings with a different set of stimuli. This novel behavioral marker conceptually mirrors in the time domain the representational momentum found with motion, whereby the estimated spatial position of a visual target is displaced in the direction of motion itself. This momentum effect in temporal arithmetic suggests a striking analogy between time processing and visuospatial processing, which might index the presence of common computational principles. (shrink)

When physical structures resonate in proximity to each other they will under certain circumstances 'sync up' in a shared resonance frequency. This is the phenomenon of spontaneous selforganization. General resonance theory (GRT), a theory of consciousness developed by Hunt and Schooler, suggests that consciousness is a product of various shared resonance frequencies at different physical scales. I suggest a heuristic for calculating the boundaries and resulting capacity for phenomenal consciousness in such resonating structures. Shared resonance results in phase transitions in (...) the speed and bandwidth of information exchange and thus richer and more complex consciousness. This approach is a solution to the 'combination problem' and 'boundary problem' of consciousness. The proposed mathematical heuristic is a practical approach for identifying potential conscious structures and the spatial and temporal boundaries of such structures over time, and also for calculating the capacity for phenomenal consciousness of any putative conscious entity. The slowest-frequency shared resonance -- the 'slowest common denominator'-- is the limiting factor for the spatial extent of any macro-consciousness. Various synchrony indexes are discussed. I describe some limitations of the proposed framework, and how it compares to Tononi's integrated information theory. IIT's constellation- qualia characterization framework is compatible with GRT and may be a useful tool in conjunction with GRT's quantification framework. (shrink)

The paper shows different approaches to creativity, i.e. emergence of new meanings, in Merleau-Ponty and Patočka. The comparison is based mainly on Merleau-Ponty’s lectures L’institution dans l’histoire personnelle et publique (1954/55) and Patočka’s project Negative Platonism (1953). Despite some similarities evident in the key concepts “institution” and “transcendence”, there is a decisive difference between the two approaches concerning the temporality of creation. Whereas Merleau-Ponty likens the temporality of institution to future perfect tense, emphasizing the intertwining of present and future events, (...) Patočka understands novelty as something totally different from the present state of affairs. In his eyes, the question of how something new can arise equals the question of how an attitude of distance to existing traditions can be achieved. Contrary to Patočka, Merleau-Ponty argues that any living tradition tends towards its own transformation and presents a case of self-transcendence because it is governed by the principle of divergence (écart). Finally, we argue that some aspects of these two approaches both complement each other, and also show the limits of each other. (shrink)

Color-motion asynchrony (CMA) refers to an apparent lag of direction of motion when a dynamic stimulus changes both color and direction at the same time. The subjective order of simultaneous events, however, is not only perceptual but also subject to illusions during voluntary actions. Self-initiated actions, for example, seem to precede their sensory outcomes following an adaptation to a delay between the action and the sensory feedback. Here, we demonstrate that the extent of the apparent asynchrony can be substantially reduced (...) when direction change is induced by a voluntary key press following a delay adaptation regime. We also show that the reduced color-motion asynchrony effect size following a motor-sensory recalibration is not a result of a change in the onset of perceived direction change relative to that of the color. This is particularly important as it implies, for the first time in the literature, that voluntary action is not only important in forming action-sensory outcome associations but may also act as a binding factor between the two perceptual features of a sensory event. (shrink)

In the flash-lag effect a non-moving object is quickly flashed directly underneath a moving object, which leads us to perceive the non-moving object as “lagging” the moving object, even though the two objects actually occupy the same horizontal position at the time of the flash. In the example above, for instance, a red square moves across a screen. At the midpoint of the red square’s journey from one side to the other, a green square is quickly presented (flashed) just below. (...) Despite the fact that the two stimuli are presented at the same coordinates along the x axis, the stationary square is perceived as behind the moving square. The perceived lag of the flashed stationary object becomes greater when the speed of the moving object is increased and vice versa (Nijhawan 1994). (shrink)

It is a commonplace to claim that art imitates life. If so, art, in performing this mimesis, should respond also to our obsession and concern with temporality (time as experienced, not as measured, or human time as opposed to what the metaphysicians claim). How does art participate in this alchemy of smelting clock time into felt time?

In his explorations of time-consciousness, Edmund Husserl often draws upon the examples of a musical tone or melody to describe temporal experience. Yet, Husserl's arguments are not about music per se, and he never engages with the internal structures and dynamics of music. More specifically, Husserl does not discuss rhythm and metre, the principal temporal modalities of music. Nonetheless, Husserl's thoughts on time-consciousness have a direct bearing on the perception of musical metre, and particularly so with respect to Christopher Hasty's (...) ideas concerning metric projection. Hasty grounds his ideas on metric projection on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead: my view is that he is better served by Husserl. This is because Husserl's understanding of the interrelationship between 'temporal fading' and 'temporal duration' enables us to account for the sense of the unfolding realization of a specific duration, a sense that is essential to the capacity to project musical metre. (shrink)

This paper is about whether consciousness flows. Evan Thompson (2014) has recently claimed that the study of binocular rivalry shows that there are some moments where consciousness does not flow, contra William James (1890). Moreover, he’s claimed that Abhidharma philosophers reject James’s claim that consciousness flows. I argue that binocular rivalry poses no special challenge to James. Second, I argue that because Thompson did not take up the question of how James and Abhidharma philosophers analyse or define flow, he under-described (...) their disagreement in a way that obscures an important conceptual contribution that Abhidharma philosophers make to the study of flow. They reject James’s claim that there are only two conceivable ways for consciousness to fail to flow, and suggest that there is a third way for consciousness to fail to flow – a way that James’s imagination did not reveal to be possible. (shrink)

Jorge Luis Borges displays an ambivalence in his writings towards the reality of time’s flow. On the one hand, he seems to accept arguments from various thinkers refuting the reality of time. “And yet, and yet…” Borges appears unable to feel completely reconciled to such a view of time. I argue that this is because a view that refutes time denies the observer too along with it. I conclude with demonstrating how Borges, by trying to identify a reconciliation between a (...) refutation of time and acknowledgment of its reality, addressed this problem. (shrink)

The idea that a sense of oneself as continuing over time is necessary for the ethical and experiential depth characteristic of a human life has been expressed frequently in philosophical work on the self and other venues. The opposing view, that preoccupation with one's diachronic extension is misleading and self-damaging, has also had forceful proponents. This paper explores this conflict via reflection on Galen Strawson's defence of the value of 'Episodic' selfexperience and an objection to Strawson raised by Kathleen Wilkes. (...) I argue that, while there are legitimate worries about superficiality with respect to the Episodic self, Strawson also offers powerful reasons to think that standard understandings of the kind of diachronic selfexperience required for an ethically and experientially full human life are too strong. Employing some structural features of narrative thought, the paper develops an account of the kind of experience of self-in-time that characterizes human self-experience that is stronger than Strawson's Episodic self but accommodates his legitimate complaints against stronger forms of Diachronic self-experience. (shrink)

Humans’ attitudes towards an event often vary depending on whether the event has already happened or has yet to take place. The dread felt at the thought of a forthcoming examination turns into relief once it is over. People also value past events less than future ones – offering less pay for work already carried out than for the same work to be carried out in the future, as recent research in psychology shows. This volume brings together philosophers and psychologists (...) with a shared interest in such psychological past/future asymmetries. It asks questions such as: What different kinds of psychological past/future asymmetries are there, and how are they related? Under what conditions do humans exhibit them? To what extent do they reflect features of time itself, or particular beliefs people have about time? Are they rational, or at least rationally permissible, or should we aspire to being temporally neutral? What exactly does temporal neutrality consist in? (shrink)

This paper approaches Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness from a mereological perspective. Taking as inspiration Bergson’s idea that pure durée is a multiplicity of interpenetration, I will show, from within Husserlian phenomenology, that the absolute flow can indeed be described as a whole of interpenetrating parts. This mereological perspective will inform my re-consideration of the much-discussed issue of Husserl’s self-criticism concerning the schema of content and apprehension. It will also reveal a fundamental similarity between Husserl’s conception of the absolute flow and (...) Sartre’s conception of lived temporality. This paper consists of four sections. Section 2 presents the basic elements of Husserl’s mereology. Section 3 introduces the difficulty encountered by Husserl’s early account of time that makes use of the schema. I will examine Barry Dainton’s criticism of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness against the background of the older debate between Meinong and Stern, a debate that has informed Husserl’s own account. Section 4 distinguishes two common criticisms of the schema from Husserl’s own self-criticism, which is in turn divided into two steps. It is shown how the second step of this self-criticism implies the interpenetration of the absolute flow and responds to Dainton’s criticism. Finally, Sect. 5 concludes with some comparative remarks. I will show how Husserl’s notion of absolute flow, as mereologically interpreted, anticipates Sartre’s conception of consciousness as self-transcendence, as well as how it accommodates the apparently conflicting mereological intuitions of Aristotle and Bergson. (shrink)

Mental time travel is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: acts on the same (...) information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two ; and is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present. (shrink)

Originally understood as memory for the “what”, the “when”, and the “where” of experienced past events, episodic memory has, in recent years, been redefined as a form of past-oriented mental time travel. Following a brief review of empirical research on memory as mental time travel, this introduction provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue, which explore the theoretical implications of that research.

Re-encountering certain kinds of artworks in the present (re-listening to music, re- reading novels) can often occasion a kind of recollection akin to episodic recollection, but which may be better cast as ‘phasic’, at least insofar as one can be said to remember ‘what it was like’ to be oneself at some earlier stage or phase in one’s personal history. The kinds of works that prompt such recollection, I call ‘still lives’ - they are limited wholes whose formal properties are (...) stable over time. In the first part of the paper, I spell out a way of making sense of the peculiar power that certain artworks have to occasion such recollection – it is, as I explain, a power or ductus that derives from the form of the artwork, though possession of such a power is not limited to art. I then detail three dimensions along which episodic recollection and phasic recollection as occasioned by re-encountering ‘still lives’ differ: metaphysical, phenomenological, and descriptive. In the second half, I explore a challenge for my account of phasic recollection, which in turn helps make more vivid my proposal as well as the spectral analogy at the heart of it: Just as one can see regions behind one by looking in the direction of a mirror located in the same space in which one is, sometimes by re-encountering certain kinds of artworks now, past intervals or phases ‘behind one’ can be ‘made present’ in a way that the paper aims to make plain. I also explain to what extent phasic recollection might be understood as a form of mental time travel, and what the attendant phenomenology of ‘transportation’ involves. (shrink)

The paper discusses radical constructivism about episodic memory as developed by Kourken Michaelian under the name of “simulationism”, a view that equates episodic memory with mental time travel. An alternative, direct realist view is defended, which implies disjunctivism about the appearance of remembering. While admitting the importance of mental time travel as an underlying cognitive mechanism in episodic memory, as well as the prima facie reasonableness of the simulationist’s critique of disjunctivism, I formulate three arguments in defense of disjunctivism, which (...) thus appears to be a feasible alternative to radical constructivism. (shrink)

Every episodic memory entails a sense of identity, which allows us to mentally travel through time. There is a special way by which the subject who is remembering comes into contact with the self that is embedded in the episodic simulation of memory: we can directly and robustly experience the protagonist in memory as ourselves. This paper explores what constitutes such experience in memory. On the face of it, the issue may seem trivial: of course, we are able to entertain (...) a sense of identity—the experience of our recollection structurally resembles our perception of the original event. However, given the phenomenon of observer memory, in which our visual perspective is decoupled from our embodied dimension, it is unclear whether it is the observing or the embodied one that is identified. This phenomenon is important not only in illustrating the complexity of identification but also in assessing how best to address it. In this paper, the issue is analyzed through concepts introduced from the literature on bodily self-consciousness. The potential approaches to addressing the issue of identification are examined, including the inheritance view, according to which the identification relies on the inheritance of mnemonic content from the original experience. I propose and argue for the self-simulation view, which suggests that what results in the experience of “I am this” in memory is the observing and the embodied dimensions as well as the relation between them, which enable different ways of projecting oneself into an episodic simulation. (shrink)

When faced with intertemporal choices, which have consequences that unfold over time, we often discount the future, preferring smaller immediate rewards often at the expense of long-term benefits. How psychologically connected one feels to one’s future self-influences such temporal discounting. Psychological connectedness consists in sharing psychological properties with past or future selves, but connectedness comes in degrees. If one feels that one is not psychologically connected to one’s future self, one views that self like a different person and is less (...) likely to wait for the future reward. Increasing perceived psychological connectedness to one’s future self may lead to more far-sighted decisions. Episodic prospection may help in this regard. Episodic prospection is our ability to ‘pre-experience’ the future by mentally simulating it, drawing on information from episodic memory and other sources. Episodic memory and prospection are thought to involve a special form of consciousness, which underpins the capacity to appreciate the connection between one’s past, present, and future selves. Simulating the future self through prospection may increase felt psychological connectedness and support future-oriented decision-making. Yet this is where a puzzle arises. The imagery of episodic memory and prospection is perspectival: often one views the visualised scenario from a detached perspective, seeing oneself from-the-outside as if viewing another person. The aim of this paper is to characterise how the perspectival imagery of prospection relates to psychological connectedness, and to show that even though such imagery involves a detached perspective it can still be used to help reward one’s future self. (shrink)

The more interest philosophers take in memory, the less agreement there is that memory exists—or more precisely, that remembering is a distinct psychological kind or mental state. Concerns about memory’s distinctiveness are triggered by observations of its similarity to imagination. The ensuing debate is cast as one between discontinuism and continuism. The landscape of debate is set such that any extensive engagement with empirical research into episodic memory places one on the side of continuism. Discontinuists concerns are portrayed as almost (...) exclusively conceptual and a priori. As philosophers of memory become increasingly interested in memory science, this pushes continuism into an apparent lead. The aim of this paper is to challenge this characterization of the continuism debate—namely, that a naturalistic approach to the philosophy of mind and memory favors continuism. My response has two components. First, I argue for weakening the alignment between naturalism and continuism. Second, I defend a naturalistically oriented, empirically-informed discontinuism between memory and imagination. I do so by introducing seeming to remember, which I argue is distinct from other mental attitudes—most importantly, from imagining. (shrink)

Episodic memory has a distinctive phenomenology. One way to capture what is distinctive about it is by using the notion of mental time travel: When we remember some fact episodically, we mentally travel to the moment at which we experienced it in the past. This way of distinguishing episodic memory from semantic memory calls for an explanation of what the experience of mental time travel is. In this paper, I suggest that a certain view about the content of memories can (...) shed some light on the experience of mental time travel. This is the view that, when a subject remembers some fact episodically, their memory represents itself as coming from a perception of that fact. I propose that the experience of mental time travel in memory is the experience of representing one of the elements in this complex content, namely, the past perceptual experience of the remembered fact. In defence of this proposal, I offer two considerations. Firstly, the proposal is consistent with the idea that memories enjoy a temporal phenomenology (specifically, a feeling of pastness). Secondly, the proposal is consistent with the possibility that some of our other cognitive capacities might yield an experience of mental time travel which can be oriented towards the future. I argue that the received conception of mental time travel is in tension with those two ideas. (shrink)

We argue that animals are not cognitively stuck in time. Evidence pertaining to multisensory temporal order perception strongly suggests that animals can represent at least some temporal relations of perceived events.

Does a temporal dual process theory explain the illusive flow of time? I point out one shortcoming of such a theory and propose an alternative that does not require either dual cognitive processes or demand such a stark asymmetry between space and time in the brain.

Although it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonstrated that causality can also influence the experience of time. In causal reordering (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013, 2016) adults tend to report the causally consistent order of events, rather than the correct temporal order. However, the effect has yet to be demonstrated in children. Across four pre-registered experiments, 4- to 10-year-old children (N=813) and adults (N=178) watched a 3-object Michotte-style ‘pseudocollision’. While in (...) the canonical version of the clip object A collided with B, which then collided with object C (order: ABC), the pseudocollision involved the same spatial array of objects but featured object C moving before object B (order: ACB), with no collision between B and C. Participants were asked to judge the temporal order of events and whether object B collided with C. Across all age groups, participants were significantly more likely to judge that B collided with C in the 3-object pseudocollision than in a 2-object control clip (where clear causal direction was lacking), despite the spatiotemporal relations between B and C being identical in the two clips (Experiments 1—3). Collision judgements and temporal order judgements were not entirely consistent, with some participants—particularly in the younger age range—basing their temporal order judgements on spatial rather than temporal information (Experiment 4). We conclude that in both children and adults, rather than causal impressions being determined only by the basic spatial-temporal properties of object movement, schemata are used in a top-down manner when interpreting perceptual displays. (shrink)

Temporal binding occurs when people observe two events that they believe to be causally connected: They underestimate the length of the interval between those two events, when compared with their estimates of the length of intervals between events they believe to be causally unrelated. I discuss temporal binding in the context of Dennett and Kinsbourne’s (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15(2), 183–201, 1992) influential argument levelled at what they call ‘Cartesian Materialism’. In particular, I argue that Dennett and Kinsbourne’s argument trades (...) on a representational conception of perceptual experience, which blurs the boundary between perception and judgement, and that temporal binding can serve as a case study for developing an alternative, relational, conception of perceptual experience and of its relation to judgement. Based on research on the mechanisms underlying temporal binding, I provide an explanation of the phenomenon in which perception and judgement play clearly distinct roles. (shrink)

This article examines the role of time as a methodological tool and pathological focus of clinical psychiatry and psychology in the first half of the 20th century. Contextualizing ‘psychopathologies of time’ developed by practitioners in Europe and North America with reference to the temporal theories implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of durée, it illuminates how depression, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders such as obsessive-compulsive behaviours and aphasia were understood to be symptomatic of an altered or disturbed ‘time-sense’. (...) Drawing upon a model of temporal synthesis whereby in healthy individuals, a subjective temporal sense ( Ichzeit, durée, or personal lifetime) was perceived and understood in relation to objective time frameworks ( Weltzeit, clock-time, or quantitative time models like historical chronology), clinicians argued that mentally ill patients were unable to synthesize Ichzeit and Weltzeit, using variations in this disturbance to define specific pathological conditions. (shrink)

This paper argues that 'duality' accounts of time, as exemplified by Henri Bergson's, Edmund Husserl's, and John McTaggart's ideas, parallel the decomposition of temporal experience in depressive psychosis into objective and subjective dimensions of time. The paper also proposes to comprehend the full-fledged depressive temporal delusion, in which the subjective flow of time comes to a standstill, via the idea of a double orientation to reality characteristic of schizophrenic delusions. In the depressive temporal delusion a person claims that time is (...) not moving while simultaneously her cognitive orientation in temporal surroundings remains largely unaffected, hence the double orientation. The juxtaposition of temporal experience in depression with the temporal disorientation in dementia enables us to situate the depressive delusion regarding the flow of time in the middle of a proposed scale of the disintegration of normal temporal experience. (shrink)

A philosophical idea about a particular relation of humans to time has found its recent psychological development in the form of the hypothesis that at some age point human children acquire a specific ability to describe the past and to think about the future, while animals do not possess this ability but are 'stuck in time'. On the other hand, animals definitely possess memory, and their behaviour constitutes a set of anticipations. A solution of this contradiction is proposed on the (...) basis of existing syntactic time descriptions. Most human languages distinguish between perfect and imperfect past. While perfect tenses emphasize the result of a past action and, therefore, connect the action to the present state of affairs, imperfect tenses address a deliberate point or episode in the past without any necessary relation to the present. A similar distinction also exists in the domain of future tenses. Some of them describe the immediate readiness to a future action, whereas others address deliberate points or periods in the future section of the time axis. I argue that the distinction between present-related and present-unrelated verb forms depicts the distinction between two different modes of being in time, the embodied and the disembodied mode. The former characterizes all behaving living beings, but there is no evidence to date that the latter can be observed in non-human animals. (shrink)

While linear time results from the measurement of physical events, the temporality of life is characterized by cyclical processes, which also manifest themselves in subjective bodily experience. This applies for the periodicity of heartbeat, respiration, sleep-wake cycle, or circadian hormone secretion, among others. The central integration of rhythmic bodily signals in the brain forms the biological foundation of the phenomenal sense of temporal continuity. Cyclical repetitions are also found in the recurring phases of need, drive, and satisfaction. Finally, the cyclical (...) structure of bodily time manifests itself at an extended level in the form of implicit or body memory. However, this cyclical structure of lived time comes into tension with the orders of linear time which have been increasingly established in Western societies since the modern age. This tension creates both individual as well as societal conflicts and may also result in psychopathological phenomena. As an example, depression and burn-out syndromes will be discussed. (shrink)

Time consciousness may elicit different concepts for each of us: some may imagine a directional flow mapping life events, others may think of the time needed to accomplish a task, or hear the musical tempo pacing their morning jogs. While we are all experts in experiencing time, introspection provides little intuition regarding the mechanisms supporting psychological time. Being conscious of time is to render intelligible the non-stationarities of brain activity with respect to its homeostatic time bases: specifically, while clocking mechanisms (...) provide operational timescales for brain computations, they do not count time per se; rather, they implement internal time metrics for the representation of events in the mind. To understand a conscious mind, using the brain's internal time metrics -- as opposed to a physical time arrow -- is essential. Still, it remains insufficient to provide insights on how the time dimension of becomes conscious content in the human mind. (shrink)

The experience of controlling events in the external world through voluntary action-- the sense of agency -- is a subtle but pervasive feature of human mental life and a constituent part of the sense of self. However, instead of reflecting an actual connection between conscious thoughts and subsequent outcomes, SoA may be an illusion. Whether this experience is an illusion, indicating no actual causal connection between conscious intention and physical outcome in the world, has been the focus of intense philosophical (...) and scientific debate since the beginnings of these fields of enquiry. More recently, the fields of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience have begun to identify specific antecedents of the experience of agency -- whether veridical or not. Similar to the perception of causality, which depends on the temporal structure of the events, humans' experience of their agency is very sensitive to the temporal interval separating bodily actions from the external effects of those actions. Accordingly, just as studies on perception of causality in the outside world have paid much attention to the temporal configuration of events, many contemporary studies have also focused on the contribution of the temporal organization of events giving rise to SoA, and in turn how experienced agency might influence subjective time. Here, I review existing evidence suggesting that subjective time both influences and is influenced by perceived causality in general, and experienced agency in particular. Finally, I briefly speculate that these findings may support predictive coding theories of cognition and perception. (shrink)

The impression of time continuity is a pervasive and given property of our subjective life. However, it appears to be compromised in patients with schizophrenia who experience what has been labelled 'self-disturbances'. We propose that the gaps in the continuity of self-experience in schizophrenia reflect disruption of non-conscious levels of temporal processing and indicate how this view is supported by experimental, phenomenological, and predictive coding approaches. Both experimental data and the phenomenology of time support the same surprising findings, i.e. the (...) unconscious, automatic processing of time is more accurate than conscious processing. These observations are also concordant with hierarchical predictive coding accounts of brain function, i.e. processing is more local or granular, with briefer timescales lower in the hierarchy. Automatic, or 'passive' integration of information over time at a high temporal resolution would ensure any gap arising when coding events consciously, i.e. at a larger timescale, are smoothed over. We suggest this to involve both retentional and protentional mechanisms. (shrink)

Episodic memory provides a peculiarly intimate kind of access to our experiential past. Does this tell us anything about the nature of time, and in particular the basis of time's direction? This paper will argue that the causal theory of temporal direction enables us to unify a number of the key features of episodic memory: its being about particular past experiences, its reliable representation of experiences as past, and the derivative nature of this kind of access to the past: that (...) is, what the memory is about, and how reliable it is, depends on the content and reliability of the original experience on which the memory is based. (shrink)

The pacemaker-accumulator model provides a framework in which the results of different duration estimation tasks are commonly accounted for. Nevertheless, the model remains abstract and it does not provide proper explanations nor predictions for duration estimations in various experimental set-ups. This paper aims to address these shortcomings by explicating an experiential pacemaker-accumulator model that supplements the standard pacemaker-accumulator model with two claims. Both of them concern the role that experiences play in duration estimation tasks and are also partly supported by (...) studies not directly related to duration estimation. First, the internal responses based on which the switch between the pacemaker and the accumulator operates are the same as the neural processes that realize conscious access to experiences. Second, the processes that realize the experiences of stimuli realize the function of the pacemaker. By supplementing the standard pacemaker-accumulator model with these claims, the model affords proper explanations for the systematic errors and empirically testable predictions in duration estimations tasks. One likely consequence of the model is that the experience of duration and the duration of experience can differ. (shrink)

Integrated information theory is an increasingly accepted and powerful theory of consciousness. IIT has faced some criticism, however, particularly with respect to the exclusion principle that is the theory's solution to the 'boundary problem': how is the boundary for any particular conscious entity drawn in each moment? I propose an alternative approach to the exclusion principle. Based on the passage of time that constitutes our normal first-person experience, I suggest that a 'time axiom' should be added to IIT, with an (...) accompanying postulate and proposed mechanism, mirroring the conceptual structure of IIT. The approach to time that I suggest follows the 'process time' of Whitehead's process philosophy. The suggested time axiom replaces the current 'exclusion axiom' and related postulate and mechanism that IIT currently employs. Under the proposed time mechanism, constituents that resonate together can under the right conditions bind together into a higher-level consciousness. This substitution is one approach for resolving the various problems presented by Tononi's exclusion principle. (shrink)

Many physicists regard the flow of time as an illusion. There is an upper level flow of time, the phenomenon of past/present/future; and there is a lower level flow of time which is really a flow of events. Perceptual completion accounts for the lower level flow of time in a few ways: apparent movement; amodal completion; and dynamic change as exemplified by a newly described modal completion that we called happening. It acts like an illusory percept connecting discrete stimuli in (...) all sensory modalities. The past/present/future distinction cannot exist unless an object is perceived to be the same now as it is then. This cognition requires object persistence. Experiments with object persistence suggest the circumstances when that, too, is an illusory percept. The illusory percepts of object persistence and perceptual completion can account for the entire flow of time. Our findings and conclusions are congruent with a few time theories and cosmologies that suggest that the flow of time is an illusion. (shrink)

It has been posited that the experience commonly called 'deja vu' can be subdivided into several types of deja experience. For the past nine years an internet questionnaire has collected data about what are called 'deja vecu' and 'deja visite' experiences. It is clear from the data that deja vecu experiences occur more frequently than do deja visite ones. Further analysis of the data has shown that deja vecu experiences were rated as being significantly longer than those of deja visite. (...) In addition, the mean age of the first experience was lower for deja vecu experiences as compared with deja visite ones. Moreover, positive emotions outweighed negative ones for both experiences while both tended to have sudden onsets. More deja vecu experiences were said to occur in a state of hyper-alertness, tended to be more comprehensive, were remembered in greater detail, and involved precognition more often than occurred in instances of deja visite. It appears one may be justified in considering these as two separate experiences. In the future, it would be desirable to conduct representative studies to obtain information about the frequencies of occurrence of the various types of deja experience in the general population and in-depth analyses regarding their situational context and content. (shrink)

I investigate Husserl's thesis that consciousness of futurity (protention) is constitutive of time-consciousness. I argue that consciousness of future states of presently perceived objects—what I call 'objective' protentions—are not constitutive of time-consciousness. Rather, Husserl's thesis only holds for 'empty' protentions—the expectation that some future state will succeed my present state.

ABSTRACTTime-consciousness has long been a focus of research in phenomenology and phenomenological psychology. We advance and extend this tradition of research by focusing on the character of temporal experience under conditions of mania. Symptom scales and diagnostic criteria for mania are peppered with temporally inflected language: increased rate of speech, racing thoughts, flight-of-ideas, hyperactivity. But what is the underlying structure of temporal experience in manic episodes? We tackle this question using a strategically hybrid approach. We recover and reconstruct three hypotheses (...) regarding manic temporality that were advanced and modeled by two pioneers of clinical phenomenology: Eugène Minkowski and Ludwig Binswanger. We then test, critique, and refine these hypotheses using heterophenomenological methods in an interview-based study of persons with a history of bipolar and a current diagnosis of acute mania. Our conclusions support a central hypothesis due to Minkowski... (shrink)

In this text we intend to analyze Bill Viola’s video installation Nantes Triptych (1992) as an example of the richness which lies in the liminal spaces between arts. We defend the thesis that the utilization of the traditional pictorial structure of the triptych in this particular work, along with the powerful audiovisual material, renders a kairological event available to the viewer. This temporal experience makes possible an existential experience when in front of this video installation. To discuss this assumption we (...) will use classical art theory texts about the triptychs, as well as, among others, Deleuze’s texts about time image and the triptych structure, Agamben’s concept of kairos, the concept of kairological artwork coined by David Chan and the philosophy of temporality developed by Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Time is an essential feature in bipolar disorder (BP). Manic and depressed BP patients perceive the speed of time as either too fast or too slow. The present article combines theoretical and empirical approaches to integrate phenomenological, psychological, and neuroscientific accounts of abnormal time perception in BP. Phenomenology distinguishes between perception of inner time, ie, self-time, and outer time, ie, world-time, that desynchronize or dissociate from each other in BP: inner time speed is abnormally slow (as in depression) or fast (...) (as in mania) and, by taking on the role as default-mode function, impacts and modulates the perception of outer time speed in an opposite way, ie, as too fast in depression and too slow in mania. Complementing, psychological investigation show opposite results in time perception, ie, time estimation and reproduction, in manic and depressed BP. Neuronally, time speed can be indexed by neuronal variability, ie, SD. Our own empirical data show opposite changes in manic and depressed BP (and major depressive disorder [MDD]) with abnormal SD balance, ie, SD ratio, between somatomotor and sensory networks that can be associated with inner and outer time. Taken together, our combined theoretical-empirical approach demonstrates that desynchronization or dissociation between inner and outer time in BP can be traced to opposite neuronal variability patterns in somatomotor and sensory networks. This opens the door for individualized therapeutic “normalization” of neuronal variability pattern in somatomotor and sensory networks by stimulation with TMS and/or tDCS. (shrink)

Research on temporal comparison has shown that people dissociate themselves from their past to attain a positive self view. Social comparison research has demonstrated that the distinctness of contextually activated information determines whether a recalled self exerts assimilation or contrast effects on the current self. However, hardly any study addressed individual differences. Also, very little is known about whether the ease or difficulty to date past events and experiences influences current self-judgments. We present a new scale capturing the degree of (...) the current self time extension. Three studies support the notion that temporal self-extension determines how past selves are accessed and processed, regarding both the abstractness with which self-knowledge is retrieved and the experienced temporal distance to the past. These findings have important implications for temporal as well as social comparison processes. (shrink)

How does one conceive time? Measurement by means of Time Metaphors Questionnaire Attitude towards time are usually expressed by means of metaphors. This paper presents phases of construction and validation of the Time Metaphors Questionnaire. This is a method for testing conceiving of time. An exploratory factor analyses yielded seven factor scales: Friendly Time, Hostile Time, Rapid Passage of Time, Significance of the Moment, Subtle Time, Wild Time and Empty Time. Results of correlations between scales of the Time Metaphors Questionnaire (...) and with selected methods indicate, among other things, an ambivalence of psychological time and an importance of positive evaluation of current moment. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to suggest a new outlook concerning the nature of Zeno’s paradoxes. The attention is directed towards the three famous paradoxes known as “Dichotomy,” “Achilles and the Tortoise,” and “The Arrow.” An analysis of the paradigmatic proposals for a solution shows that an adequate solution has not yet been reached. An answer is provided instead to the question “How Zeno’s paradoxes emerge in their quality of aporiae?,” that is to say in their quality of impasses, (...) of problem situations without an exit, what is the original meaning of the Greek word “aporia.” It is my claim that this is the correct rational approach for solving these conceptual puzzles. In other words, I am not proposing formal solutions by criticizing and/or altering their premises assuming the continuous or discrete nature of space and time, but I try to draw the philosophical attention to the way we possess the phenomenon of motion as a result of the perception of space-time in human experience. (shrink)

The article examines space as a hierarchy of differences and as a basic phenomenon of the world, while calling into question the existence of time as a natural process and basis for human experience. It analyses the functionality of time in connection with various types of individual spaces and reveals the correlativity of space and consciousness.

The paper concerns a form of experiencing time which is specific for haiku poetry. Haiku is an expression of the momentary glimpse of time. Haiku poetry treats the moment uninstrumentally, neither as a result of the past nor as a transition to future deeds. Seen this way, the moment arises on the stream of time as a unique, existential experience. It is my attempt to explain the phenomenon of this experience of “now” as I explore the metaphors of “background”, “figure” (...) and “composition”. (shrink)

I intend to defend three claims in this paper: Locke's position does imply a specious present theory, one which importantly resembles a version adopted by C. D. Broad. Contrary to what some commentators think or imply, Locke does not make the ideas which occupy the specious present durationless and he does not confine the specious present to the duration of what we experience in reflection. The theory he implies does create a serious problem for him, however, and in order to (...) avoid the problem he must drop the reflective specious present.The specious present theory in general holds that what we experience as a whole is never instantaneous and that at least part of the duration of what we experience as a whole at a given time is earlier than that time. The experienced present is always at least in part a bit of the past. For example, if at t I hear a sequence of sounds, then at least the first sound in the sequence is earlier than t, since I first heard it before t. (shrink)

The paper will explore a key tension between eternity and temporality that comes to the fore in the seeming contradiction between freedom of the human will and divine foreknowledge of future contingents. It will be claimed that Duns Scotus’s adaptation of Thomas Aquinas’s view reduces the tension between a human being’s freedom and divine foreknowledge of future contingents to the question of how to conflate the now of eternity and our experience of the instantaneous now. Scotus’s account of the matter (...) is unfortunately not satisfying and it is the purpose of this paper to develop this insight further in a speculative manner. In order to make such co-nowness possible, it will be asked how the eternal and the temporal can co-cause together. This problem will be tackled through a development of Scotus’s doctrine of the will taken elsewhere, in order to examine how the divine and the human wills can occur together. It will be claimed that such co-willing produces a co-nowness of the eternal and the instantaneous ‘nows’ which generates a logical temporal movement. (shrink)

We view things from a certain position in time: in our language, thought, feelings and actions, we draw distinctions between what has happened, is happening, and will happen. Frequently, approaches to this feature of our lives - those seen in disputes between tensed and tenseless theories, between realist and anti-realist treatments of past and future, and in accounts of historical knowledge - embody serious misunderstandings of the character of the issues; they misconstrue the relation between metaphysics and ethics, and the (...) way to characterize the kind of sense which tensed language has. David Cockburn argues that the notion of 'reasons for emotion' must have a central place in any account of meaning, and that the present should have no priority in our understanding of tense. This allows for a more satisfactory articulation of the place of past, present and future in our thought, and of the form which criticism of our thought might take. (shrink)

The last century has seen enormous progress in our understanding of time. This volume features original essays by the foremost philosophers of time discussing the goals and methodology of the philosophy of time, and examining the best way to move forward with regard to the field's core issues. The collection is unique in combining cutting edge work on time with a focus on the big picture of time studies as a discipline. The major questions asked include: What are the implications (...) of relativity and quantum physics on our understanding of time? Is the passage of time real, or just a subjective phenomenon? Are the past and future real, or is the present all that exists? If the future is real and unchanging, how is free will possible? Since only the present moment is perceived, how does the experience as we know it come about? How does experience take on its character of a continuous flow of moments or events? What explains the apparent one-way direction of time? Is time travel a logical/metaphysical possibility? (shrink)

Modern physics has revealed the universe as a much stranger place than we could have imagined. The puzzle at the centre of our knowledge of the universe is time. Michael Lockwood takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the nature of things. He investigates philosophical questions about past, present, and future, our experience of time, and the possibility of time travel. We zoom in on the behaviour of molecules and atoms, and pull back to survey the expansion of the (...) universe. We learn about entropy and gravity, black holes and wormholes, about how it all began and where we are all headed. Things will never seem the same again after a voyage through The Labyrinth of Time. (shrink)

Experience is inescapably temporal. But how do we experience time? Temporal experience is a fundamental subject in philosophy – according to Husserl, the most important and difficult of all. Its puzzles and paradoxes were of critical interest from the Early Moderns through to the Post-Kantians. After a period of relative neglect, temporal experience is again at the forefront of debates across a wealth of areas, from philosophy of mind and psychology, to metaphysics and aesthetics. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of (...) Temporal Experience is an outstanding reference source to the key debates in this exciting subject area and represents the first collection of its kind. Comprising nearly thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Handbook_ is organised into seven clear parts: Ancient and early modern perspectives Nineteenth and early twentieth-century perspectives The structure of temporal experience Temporal experience and the philosophy of mind Temporal experience and metaphysics Empirical perspectives Aesthetics Within each part key topics concerning temporal experience are examined, including canonical figures such as Locke, Kant and Husserl; extensionalism, retentionalism and the specious present; interrelations between temporal experience and time, agency, dreaming, and the self; empirical theories of perceiving and attending to time; and temporal awareness in the arts including dance, music and film. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience is essential reading for students and researchers of philosophy of mind and psychology. It is also extremely useful for those in related fields such as metaphysics, phenomenology and aesthetics, as well as to psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists. (shrink)

Supporters of the A-theory of time sometimes refer to an alleged experience of the passage of time in support of their theory. In this paper I argue that it is an illusion that we experience the passage of time, for such an experience is impossible. My argument relies on the general assertion that experience is contingent, in the sense that if it is possible to experience the passage of time, it is also possible to experience that time does not pass. (...) Having established this claim, I argue that it is impossible to experience that time does not pass, and hence that it is impossible to experience the passage of time. (shrink)

The purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to investigate the temporal experience of artists during the conception and generation of artworks. ;The hybrid methodology of this qualitative study establishes a philosophical framework to integrate ideas from philosophy, psychology, physics, neurobiology, and the arts. Phenomenological language illustrates the philosophical line of reasoning throughout. ;Two composers, three choreographers, two visual artists, one novelist, and one fashion designer were interviewed through a series of open-ended questions. ;Chapter I initiates discussion of the 'now' moment (...) of creative action and sequences the phases of artistic creativity including: incubation, impulsion, the action/ event, encounter, the emergence of the voice /life of the artwork itself, entrainment , creative/aesthetic engagement, and feedback looping. ;Chapter II details methodology and procedure and identifies the theoretical contributors to the research, particularly Stephen Hawking, Edmund Husserl, John Dewey, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. ;Chapter III discusses of the temporal substrate of the imagination, named the matrix of subjective time. The matrix of subjective time facilitates a synthesis of memory and expectation, an evolving range of possibility and probability, and a fluid juxtaposition of temporal referents that facilitates the conception and construction of new artistic ideas. ;Chapter IV describes of the temporal dynamics and temporal strategies that surround the artist's transition from creative imagination to creative action. The dynamics are represented as vectors whose summation must produce a disequilibrium in order for concrete creative action to occur. ;Chapter V magnifies the artist's working rhythm. The artist balances and shifts many temporal components to move the artwork toward completion. These components include: imagination, self-critique , sensory interaction with the materials, sensory perception of the emerging form, the demands of the medium, and documentation. ;Chapter VI explores the temporally transcendent state of creativity that artists occasionally access. Time dilation is described as the entry point for the experience of creative hyper flow in the realm of deep time. ;Chapter VII presents a summary of the artist's ongoing negotiation of time. By studying the patterns of temporal negotiations that artists experience, we come to a deeper understanding of both time and creativity. (shrink)

I intend to defend three claims in this paper: Locke's position does imply a specious present theory, one which importantly resembles a version adopted by C. D. Broad. Contrary to what some commentators think or imply, Locke does not make the ideas which occupy the specious present durationless and he does not confine the specious present to the duration of what we experience in reflection. The theory he implies does create a serious problem for him, however, and in order to (...) avoid the problem he must drop the reflective specious present.The specious present theory in general holds that what we experience as a whole is never instantaneous and that at least part of the duration of what we experience as a whole at a given time is earlier than that time. The experienced present is always at least in part a bit of the past. For example, if at t I hear a sequence of sounds, then at least the first sound in the sequence is earlier than t, since I first heard it before t. (shrink)

This ambitious work aims to shed new light on the relations between Husserlian phenomenology and the present-day efforts toward a scientific theory of cognition—with its complex structure of disciplines, levels of explanation, and ...

There is a much-discussed form of argument the conclusion of which is that we do not directly perceive space-filling material objects themselves, only parts of their surfaces. Donald Davidson's view that events are temporal particulars invites a structurally similar argument about the direct perception of events. In this paper, I spell out such an argument and consider a number of possible solutions to it. I explore the idea that a satisfactory response to this problem in the philosophy of perception can (...) be grounded in a temporal ontology that includes temporal stuff as well as temporal particulars. I discuss different ways of developing this idea, and I go on to identify what I take to be the most promising version of an approach of this kind. (shrink)

This paper analyses explanations provided by current philosophical models of time consciousness. These models attempt to explain temporal experience by describing the mechanisms of time consciousness in experiential terms. I criticize this practice on two grounds; firstly, it relies upon folk notions that have no clear individuation conditions and secondly because it often merely names, but does not explain the phenomena.

There is a persisting tension that exists between the block universe conception of time in modern physics and philosophy and the conception of time that stems naturally from experience, and entropic asymmetries have been proposed to explain this tension. This article argues that as biochemical processes in the brain depend upon spontaneous entropy increases in the forward-time direction, this should provide an entropic basis for the unidirectionality of psychological processes. As this view does not depend on considerations of abstract information (...) processing or a past hypothesis, it provides advantages over previous entropy-based proposals attempting to explain asymmetries in temporal experience. (shrink)

Time passes, and the inexorability of its passing has deep emotional significance. One of the main themes of this thesis involves an investigation into the metaphysical nature of the passage of time. What sort of metaphysical account of passage should be given? And do our emotional responses to temporal passage have metaphysical implications? The other main theme of the thesis is the issue of the metaphysics of persistence. When a thing is present at more than one time, what is the (...) metaphysical underpinning of its persistence? Some subsidiary issues, which are nevertheless important in their own right, are also discussed. There are interesting connections between the issues of persistence and these further issues, which include the nature of vagueness, and the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties. (shrink)

How must experience of time be structured in time? In particular, does the following principle, which I will call inheritance, hold: for any temporal property apparently presented in perceptual experience, experience itself has that same temporal property. For instance, if I hear Paul McCartney singing ‘Hey Jude’, must my auditory experience of the ‘Hey’ itself precede my auditory experience of the ‘Jude’, or can the temporal order of these experiences come apart from the order the words are experienced as having? (...) A number of recent authors (Phillips Experience and Time, ‘The Temporal Structure of Experience’, Soteriou ‘Perceiving Events’, Hoerl ‘“A Succession of Feelings, in and of Itself, is Not a Feeling of Succession”’, Rashbrook) claim, to paraphrase Martin (399), that inheritance best characterises how our temporal experience seems to initial reflective intuition. For this reason, Phillips takes the principle to form part of our naïve view of temporal experience. An opposing group of theorists object that inheritance is subject to empirical counter-example. This article surveys such challenges. Section 2 considers Grush's case against inheritance based on postdiction. Section 3 examines Watzl's anti-inheritance argument based on silencing effects. Finally, Section 4 explores a number of alleged counter-examples proposed by Lee (‘Temporal Experience and the Temporal Structure of Experience’). Section 1 provides essential background to the debate. (shrink)

Consider the idea of the present moment in time. This is one of the most imprecise of concepts. Does it last for an instant or for three seconds? Do all the parts of a brain share the same present moment? Is the present moment one is conscious of even coherent enough to compare to the position of the hands of a clock? In a relativistic universe, can it ever be sensible to talk about a present? To the best of our (...) knowledge, the answers to all the above questions must be had at the expense of the integrity of the idea of ‘now'. People do not make very good clocks -- we are poor at sensing the absolute passage of time, and, even if we were better at it, relativity would only allow us to share a ‘now’ with compromised accuracy. Despite the looseness of the present moment, the fact that we can talk about it at all, even with imprecision and ambiguity, is an important bit of evidence to keep in mind when considering consciousness. Let's suppose the universe is, for practical purposes, deterministic. The universe in this case isn't ‘doing anything’ that can distinguish one moment from another. And yet the human perspective does achieve such a distinction. The vaguely perceived present moment is distinguished from other moments. This human ability reminds one of the old joke about a dancing bear: it's not that the bear dances well, but that he dances at all that charms an audience. The very concept of a present moment is only meaningful to one who is trapped in time by being conscious. (shrink)

Dolev's ambitious project is to show that the traditional debate in the philosophy of time between the so-called ‘tensed’ and ‘tenseless’ theorists is not a sustainable one. The key to the negative portion argument is that both the tensed and tenseless view of time can be understood only from within their respective ontological frameworks. Moreover, that there is only really an appearance of understanding within these frameworks, since neither framework furnishes us with the wherewithal to genuinely understand temporal language. Moving (...) past these frameworks is the goal Dolev sets us. The positive aspect of the text tries to teach us how to transcend this merely ontological dispute and engage in phenomenological considerations of time itself. The conclusion to the positive project is that we cannot postulate an adequate metaphysical system of time, though we can understand what time is if we treat it as the time of our experiences in everyday life .The prospect that we might be able to move past the existing debate into fresh philosophical terrain is exciting. But I am not quite persuaded by the arguments that are intended to motivate the move to pastures new. First, on occasion Dolev seems to slightly …. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that there can be no mental representation of objective ‘tensed’ features of reality of the kind that might be thought to occur when we experience time passing or think of times as past, present or future, whether or not such features are part of mind-independent reality. This, I hold, has important consequences for metaphysics; but (as will be most relevant to this volume) it is also likely to have important consequences for a correct semantics for (...) tense. In a nutshell, no correct semantics for tense can treat what philosophers call ‘A-properties’ (such as real pastness, presentness or futurity) as semantic values. (shrink)

The title of my paper may look odd. If one is questioned “What is a dog?”, everyone could give a more or less valid answer. But to the question “What is not a dog?”, there can be innumerable answers which may be correct, but mostly quite unhelpful. Provisionally, what I intend to do under this title is to consider what we should not hold time to be. Through the history of ideas we meet various opinions and theories concerning what time (...) is. But it seems to me that most of them are not adequate enough, though each has its reason and often profound import as well. So I would like here to make a proposal for reconsidering how time appears in our life and thinking. (shrink)

Experience of matter can be described in the context of time and space, whereas, some people say, experience of mind may be described according to time only. Accordingly, though time and space together are regarded as objective forms, one may have a propensity for treating time alone as a particular form of the subjective consciousness. For space is indeed referred to the self-evidence of being, while time is thought to belong rather to the self-evidence of our own consciousness. According to (...) my opinion, however, even the spatial description is indispensable for the state of “mind”. For instance, the contents of our consciousness can be described only in terms of the localized phases of their images. Contrary to Kant, who regarded time and space together as forms of the outer intuition (i.e. as conditions of sensation), and time alone as form of the inner sense, I have a firm intention to assert them both as two forms of objective being because it is the being itself that can be the ultimate object of any of our cognitive powers — sensation, understanding and reason. Time and space are not forms proper to a particular “being” such as conscious existence like ours; they are also, nay, above all, two objective forms of being in general that transcends all such limited existences. It follows that these forms themselves, once abstracted in our mind, must, first of all, be valid for material beings; after that, i.e. derivatively and analogically, they may also be valid for mind-beings. The main aim of this paper is “dialectically” to elucidate that fact on the subject of time in particular. (shrink)

Time is analyzed as being those processes by which a system notes the processes which comprise its own existence. The directionality of time is given by the concepts, past, present, and future. To understand the meaning of these concepts, a set of experiments was carried out with four male subjects in which areas of time were expanded or ablated by means of post-hypnotic suggestions. These operations were carried out singly or in combination. The data suggest that the present is primarily (...) associated with stimulus input, the past with the criteria for defining that input as well as the development of response inhibitions and the future with the directionality of that input. Marked personality changes which range from the occurence of catatonic-like states to obsessive types of reaction and manic-like reactions are associated with different combinations of time alterations. Some of the changes are in accord with the serialist position on time of J. W. Dunne. The concept of death is very important both with regard to one’s view of time and how one lives. While it is important to live in the present, the present has no meaning without at least a past or a future. Implications of these findings for psychopathology in general and schizophrenia in particular are considered. (shrink)

... there are cases in which on the basis of a temporally extended content of consciousness a unitary apprehension takes place which is spread out over a temporal interval (the so-called specious present). ... That several successive tones yield a melody is possible only in this way, that the succession of psychical processes are united "forthwith" in a common structure.

A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time is a concise and accessible survey of the history of philosophical and scientific developments in understanding time and our experience of time. It discusses prominent ideas about the nature of time, plus many subsidiary puzzles about time, from the classical period through the present.

This essay pursues two goals: to argue that two fundamental types of time—the time of objective reality and “the time of the soul”—meet in human activity and history and to defend the legitimacy of calling a particular version of the second type a kind of time. The essay begins by criticizing Paul Ricoeur’s version of the claim that times of these two sorts meet in history. It then presents an account of human activity based on Heidegger’s Being and Time, according (...) to which certain times of the two types—existential temporality and succession—meet in human activity. The legitimacy of calling existential temporality a kind of time is then defended via an expanded analysis of activity that examines where the two times meet there. The concluding section briefly considers a conception of historical time due to David Carr before showing why history is a broader domain encompassing human activity where the two times meet. (shrink)

In this article, I explore cultural effects of Soviet religious policies in aboriginal Siberia by looking at the transformation of ritual identities and practices in a group of Evenki hunters and herders between the 1920s and the 1990s. I focus on meanings of buhadyl ("spirits") which Evenki associate with old things and dead people. I read meanings and ritual frameworks of dealing with the buhadyl as sites for re‐imagining Evenki identities and categories of belonging in the context of Soviet society (...) and Soviet ethnographic gaze. In this article, I use results of my own field research in Central Siberia, as well as newly available Soviet archival materials. (shrink)

Descartes' account of the material world relies heavily on time. Most importantly, time is a component of speed, which figures in his fundamental conservation principle and laws. However, in his most systematic discussion of the concept, time is treated as some-how reducible both to thought and to motion. Such reductionistic views, while common among Descartes' late scholastic contemporaries, are very ill-suited to Cartesian physics. I show that, in spite of the apparent identifications with thought and motion, Cartesian time retains—in the (...) form of what I will call 'successive duration'—precisely the intrinsic structure necessary to serve as an independent parameter of quantitative physics. As is often the case with Descartes, he gives the impression of embracing traditional doctrines while in fact radically transforming the underlying concepts to serve his scientific agenda. His theory of time, though formulated in Aristotelian terms, anticipates Newton in important respects. (shrink)

This article explores the extent to which Heidegger promises a novel understanding of the concept of time. Heidegger believes that the tradition of philosophy was mistaken in interpreting time as a moveable image of eternity. We are told that this definition of time is intelligible only if we have eternity as a point of departure to understand the meaning of time. Yet, Heidegger believes that we are barred from such a viewpoint. We can only understand the phenomenon of time from (...) our mortal or finite vantage point. Contrary to the tradition of philosophy, Heidegger argues that time does not find its meaning in eternity, time finds its meaning in death. The article takes Heidegger's position to task. It argues that it is not evident why Heidegger's account of time should in any way be superior to the traditional conception of time. Drawing on the criticism raised by Lévinas and Blanchot, that death — like eternity — is never at our disposal to understand the phenomenon of time, it shows that although Heidegger is aware that death is never an event in our life, he nonetheless claims that it is the awareness of our finitude that informs our understanding of time. Yet if Heidegger does not see it as a problem that death is never at our disposal, then it becomes questionable whether Heidegger's initial critique launched against the tradition of philosophy still holds, because it is no longer evident why it matters that eternity, as a point of departure, is never at our disposal to understand the phenomenon of time. (shrink)

This article examines the phenomenological structures of the homo temporalis filtered through Augustine's illuminating, if unsystematic, insights on temporality and the imago Dei. It situates such a phenomenological interpretation of the Augustinian self in view of current interpretations that polarize or split the Augustinian self into an either/or scheme—either an “interior” self or an “exterior” self. Given this imbalance, the article suggests that a phenomenological evaluation of Augustine brings to light how interior and exterior spheres are deeply integrated. The article (...) elaborates this position by contending that the self's temporal streaming within the exterior world‐horizon is inescapable because it reflects basic constituents of a self created by God which is nevertheless capable of contemplating a God who transcends time. This seeming paradox is resolved by recourse to what is described as the “double entry” of the self. The temporal streaming of the self in the world‐horizon is porous to the eternal inwardly ; the eternal entry is thus interior and analyzable in terms of a non‐reflective self‐awareness on display in Augustine's De Trinitate; and finally Augustine's understanding of the temporality of faith indicates how the self of faith can be lived in light of Heidegger's emphasis on the future and Husserl's emphasis on the past. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Eternal Present: Slow Knowledge and the Renewal of TimeDouglas E. ChristieA woman is seated in a chair at the center of a large, light-filled atrium. Across from her sits an adolescent girl, Asian or Asian-American, maybe thirteen years old. They are both perfectly still. They look intently at each other. That is all. Minute after minute passes. Neither of them moves. I look more closely. Utter stillness. Not (...) quite repose, for there is a sense of intentionality to their engagement with each other, but deep stillness and calm. I look around the room and see a hundred or so persons also taking in the scene. Everyone is silent, though there are occasional sounds—shoes shuffling on the floor, a cough, a sigh. It takes me a few minutes to understand what is going on, what I am seeing. I feel my own anxiety to place myself somehow in this scene, to find the appropriate categories for grasping what is unfolding before me. I ask a person nearby; he tells me: it’s Marina Abramovic. She is performing “The Artist Is Present,” part of a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.1 “Oh,” I say, “thanks.” It’s performance art. Got it. But knowing this only helps a little. What are they doing? What is going on here? What is my part, if any, in what is happening? My mind, as usual, is racing ahead trying to figure it out. Which in this moment I cannot do. So, I pause (inwardly), take a step back and try to reorient myself. I take a breath, then another. I look again at the two figures.Their stillness is uncanny. This is part of what is making me anxious, I think. They are absorbed completely in the simple act of gazing at each other. I smile, thinking at first of the “stare-downs” I used to have with my brother when we were kids. Who would flinch (and fall into uncontrollable laughter) first? It was a game of chicken. With the eyes. Usually it was of short duration, and someone had to lose. This is different. The quality of attention, in particular, feels utterly different. These two are not trying to knock each other off their chairs. No one is trying to “win” at anything. They are, it seems, simply giving themselves to the work of beholding and being beheld. Extraordinary. I am not sitting in the chair. But I feel a jolt run through my body as I begin to feel the depth and power of this moment. The sense of nakedness, of naked abandon, of vulnerability. What else? Tenderness. Yes, I sense a certain tenderness passing between these two figures. And not just between them. Also touching those of us gathered in the room watching them. How is that possible? We are all [End Page 13] strangers to one another after all. And yet within this space, for these few moments there is a remarkable and palpable sense of intimacy.I am not sure at how long I stand there. But after a while, I feel the need to move, to get some relief from the intensity of this exchange. I leave the room where the artist and her companion are sitting and walk into a nearby gallery. (Later I learn that anyone visiting the museum can occupy the chair opposite the artist and that over the course of the exhibit many, many people do just that.) I am not ready to look at anything else, not yet. I have to gather myself a little first.Eventually, I do begin to take in some of the other art in the museum. But my mind keeps returning to that room and to those two seated figures. During the next couple of hours, I return to the atrium several more times. Each time I do, I am struck by how still these two figures are, how alive. Also how still and alive I feel entering into that space. Those of us beholding the scene are respectful and quiet but also animated, exchanging brief whispers, glances, smiles. We are captivated, enthralled.Suddenly... (shrink)

In these lectures, given at Göttingen in 1904-1910, Husserl describes the phenomenological content of lived experiences of time, Zeiterlebnisse, and defines the differences between acts of consciousness. He carefully shows how inner time is constituted as a continuum through the retentional modifications of consciousness. Consciousness is not merely temporal; it is temporality and the basis for the constitution of objective time. The translation is crystal-clear, though this makes the doctrine no less difficult. This early work shows that Husserl practiced phenomenology (...) before he formulated its methodological principles in the Ideen.—A. B. D. (shrink)

The paper develops an objection to the extensional model of time consciousness—the view that temporally extended events or processes, and their temporal properties, can be directly perceived as such. Importantly, following James, advocates of the extensional model typically insist that whole experiences of temporal relations between non-simultaneous events are distinct from mere successions of their temporal parts. This means, presumably, that there ought to be some feature(s) differentiating the former from the latter. I try to show why the extensional models (...) offers no credible ground for positing such a difference. (shrink)

Francois Recanati has recently argued that each perceptual state has two distinct kinds of content, complete and explicit content. According to Recanati, the former is a function of the latter and the psychological mode of perception. Furthermore, he has argued that explicit content is temporally neutral and that time-consciousness is a feature of psychological mode. In this paper it is argued, pace Recanati, that explicit content is not temporally neutral. Recanati’s position is initially presented. Three desiderata for a theory of (...) time-consciousness are subsequently introduced. It is then argued that a theory locating time-consciousness as a feature of psychological mode will fail to satisfy these desiderata. In the last section the intentionality of memories is discussed. Using the notion of shiftable indexical, it is argued that memories have the same explicit content as perceptions, but that they nevertheless can have different conditions of satisfaction since they are entertained in different modes. (shrink)

Our goal is to investigate the biological correlates of the first-person experience of time or phenomenal time. ‘Time’ differs in various domains, such as (i) physical time (e.g., clock time), (ii) biological time, such as the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and (iii) the perceptual rate of time. One psychophysical-measure of the perceptual rate is the critical flicker frequency (CFF), in which a flashing light is perceived as unchanging. Focusing on the inability to detect change, as in CFF, may give us insight into (...) phenomenal time. CFF varies from 24 Hz for dim light and 60 Hz in bright light and is lower for colored lights. We propose that problem of the phenomenal time can be addressed using two contrasting but complementary approaches (inability to detect changes vs. ability to detect changes): (1) The soliton-catalytic model that entails invariant quantum coherent state for temporal frequencies (TFs) >= CFF, where flickering light is perceived as unchanging, similar to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). (2) Temporal frequency tuned mechanisms model, which starts with ability to detect changes for TFs < CFF and then their sensitivities decreases to zero at CFF. For a subject who has CFF of 60 Hz, the duration of one cycle or time-period of the flickering light is approximately 16.7 ms. Phenomenal time may be quantized into ‘subjective occasions of experience’ (SE), which arise out of the interaction of the individual with situation (environment). Pioneering work examining the complex interaction of neurons suggests the possibility that macroscopic quantum states similar to a BEC may also occur in the brain (Davia, 2006; Freeman & Vitiello, 2006; Georgiev, 2004; Vimal & Davia, 2008) . (shrink)

Time’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until creatively determined in the present. But time’s arrow is unnecessary in Einstein’s so-called block universe, so there is no creative unfolding in an actual present. How can there be an actual present when there is no universal moment of simultaneity? Events in various places will have different presents according to the position, velocity, and nature of the perceiver. Standing against (...) this view is traditional common sense since we normally experience time’s arrow as reality and the present as our place in the stream of consciousness, but we err to imagine we are living in the actual present. The present of our daily experience is actually a specious present, according to E. Robert Kelly (later popularized by William James), or duration, according to Henri Bergson, an habitus, as elucidated by Kerby (1991), or, simply, the psychological present (Adams, 2010) – all terms indicating that our experienced present so consists of the past overlapping into the future that any potential for acting from the creative moment is crowded out. Yet, for philosophers of process from Herakleitos onward, it is the philosophies of change or process that treat time’s arrow and the creative fire of the actual present as realities. In this essay, I examine the most well known but possibly least understood process cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead to seek out this elusive but actual present. In doing so, I will also ask if process philosophy is itself an example of the creative imagination and if this relates to doing science. I conclude Whitehead's process philosophy falls short of allowing for the actual creative spontaneity of a dynamic (eternal) present. (shrink)

In a recent article, ‘Tensed Time and Our Differential Experience of the Past and Future,’ William Lane Craig attempts to resuscitate A. N. Prior's ‘Thank Goodness’ argument against the B-theory by combining it with Plantinga's views about basic beliefs. In essence Craig's view is that since there is a universal experience and belief in the objectivity of tense and the reality of becoming, ‘this belief constitutes an intrinsic defeater-defeater which overwhelms the objections brought against it.’ An intrinsic defeater-defeater is a (...) belief that enjoys such warrant for us that it simply overwhelms the defeaters brought against it without specifically rebutting or undercutting them. Thus, Craig claims that an effete philosophical argument like McTaggart's paradox is nothing more than ‘an engaging and recalcitrant brain teaser whose conclusion nobody really takes seriously.’ It is difficult to reconcile this statement with Craig's own writings elsewhere. For Craig has vigorously argued in at least two other articles that 'hybrid A-B theorists like McCall, Schlesinger, and Smith [who give ontological status to both A-properties and B-relations] are in deep trouble’ since they are all effectively refuted by McTaggart's Paradox. It is not Craig's inconsistency regarding the significance of McTaggart conundrum that I want to draw attention to, however. Rather I wish to raise a different issue. (shrink)

In the introduction to Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, Husserl remarks that “we get entangled in the most peculiar difficulties, contradictions, and confusions” (Hua X, 4) the moment we seek to account for time-consciousness. I think most scholars of Husserl’s writings on these issues would agree. Attempting to unravel the inner workings of time-consciousness can indeed easily induce a kind of intellectual vertigo. Let us consequently start with some of the basic questions that motivated Husserl’s inquiry.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 195-198 [Access article in PDF] Implicit and Explicit Temporality Thomas Fuchs Keywords implicit/explicit temporality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, desynchronization, melancholia, schizophrenia Since Minkowski (1970), Strauss (1966), v. Gebsattel (1954), and Tellenbach (1980), temporality has been a main subject of phenomenological psychiatry. Drawing on philosophical concepts of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, these authors have analyzed psychopathologic deviations of time experience, mainly from an individual point of (...) view, for example, as a slowing down or inhibition of lived time in depression or obsessive–compulsive disorder. Their analyses are still most valuable today, but may be carried further by introducing concepts such as embodied and intersubjective temporality into psychopathology. Martin Wyllie (2005), by opening up a wide scope of temporal phenomena and related concepts, makes a laudable effort to contribute to such a progress.In my commentary, I would like to propose a distinction that is suggested by much of Wyllie's analysis and may shed further light on psychopathology, namely between implicit and explicit temporality. If we look at a child while obliviously playing with his toys, lost to the world, we may assume that there is no sense of the time passing. Lived time runs with the movement of life, implicit in the child's experience of being engaged in his play and directed toward his goals. It "unfolds through the processes of bodily activity" (Wyllie 2005). Future and past do not stand out against the pure presence of "becoming." This implicit mode of temporality is retrieved every time that we are absorbed in what we are doing, and may even reach the climax of "flow experiences" (Csikszentmihalyi 1988) where the sense of time is lost in unimpeded, fluent performance.However, this changes when a gap arises between need and satisfaction, desire and fulfillment, or plan and execution. Now the future appears as a "not yet" or "yet to come," experienced as the temporality of awaiting, striving, or longing for. Time is felt as passing by and refusing the desired fulfillment; it becomes conscious or explicit. A similar gap arises between the present and something irretrievably lost, bringing the past to consciousness as a "no more." Again time is experienced explicitly, but now as moving on relentlessly and separating us from the lost object. The gap to the past may not be bridged any more: this is the temporality of missing or mourning. In both cases, explicit time arises as a negation of implicit or lived time (here my use of the term is a bit divergent from Wyllie's); it is experienced as a "not yet" or "no more," often with a component of displeasure or suffering (Fuchs 2001a, 2003)."Implicit" versus "explicit time" thus come near to another distinction well known in phenomenology, namely between the "lived" and [End Page 195] the "corporal body" (Leib versus Koerper). The first term refers to the body functioning in the tacit mode, as the medium of everyday performance. The second term points to the body as turning into the object of attention, for example, when it puts up resistance to our purposes, or is used as an instrument deliberately (Fuchs 2001b). In fact, implicit temporality and tacit performance of the body are nearly synonymous: Lived time may be regarded as a function of the lived body, opened up by its potentiality and capability. The more we are engaged in our tasks, the more we forget time as well as the body; we are, as it were, "inside time." On the other hand, in explicit temporality the body often appears in the corporal or explicit mode as well. For example, when falling ill, we experience our body no more as a tacit medium but rather as an object or obstacle, while we notice the slowing down of time and may even feel excluded from the movement of life. Thus, embodiment and temporality have a parallel background–foreground structure.I now try to carry these considerations further by including the intersubjective dimension of time. In an earlier paper, I describe the attunement of the living being to its environment as a continuous synchronization on the biological as... (shrink)

Subjects estimated the time of intentions to perform an action, of the action itself, or of an auditory effect of the action. A perceptual attraction or binding effect occurred between actions and the effects that followed them. Judgements of intentions did not show this binding, suggesting they are represented independently of actions and their effects. In additional unpredictable judgement conditions, subjects were instructed only after each trial which of these events to judge, thus discouraging focussed attention to a specific event. (...) Stronger binding effects were found, with intention, action and effect fusing to a single central point in time. In a control task, subjects reported the time of the first or second tone in sequence. Tone sequences showed no binding at all when subjects knew in advance which tone to judge, but showed the same fusion as actions when the event to be judged was not predictable. Binding of actions and effects, but not of tone sequences, occurs pre-attentively, and automatically. The data are consistent with a reconstructive process, implemented after actions, which generates a coherent sense of agency. However, this process should only be triggered only when our actions make it appropriate. We suggest that this mechanism is triggered in advance by efferent processing. This conclusion was supported by a further study in deafferented subject IW. This subject showed the normal binding of a tone towards an action, although his experience of the action was of pre-motor, rather than peripheral origin. The experience of intentional action involves an interplay between pre-motor and reconstructive processes. (shrink)

In what follows, I suggest that, against most theories of time, there really is an actual present, a now, but that such an eternal moment cannot be found before or after time. It may even be semantically incoherent to say that such an eternal present exists since “it” is changeless and formless (presumably a dynamic chaos without location or duration) yet with creative potential. Such a field of near-infinite potential energy could have had no beginning and will have no end, (...) yet within it stirs the desire to experience that brings forth singularities, like the one that exploded into the Big Bang (experiencing itself through relative and relational spacetime). From the perspective of the eternal now of near-infinite possibilities (if such a sentence can be semantically parsed at all), there is only the timeless creative present, so the Big Bang did not happen some 13 billion years ago. Inasmuch as there is neither time past nor time future nor any time at all at the null point of forever, we must understand the Big Bang (and all other events) as taking place right here and now. In terms of the eternal now, the beginning is happening now and we just appeared (and are always just appearing) to witness it. The rest is all conscious construction; time and experience are so entangled, they need each other to exist. (shrink)

The authors of the essays collected in this volume continue that tradition, challenging, expanding, and deepening it.