Temporal Experience

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. (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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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 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 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.