Temporal Experience, Misc

How does the temporal knowledge argument fair when exposed to Chalmers' 2-dimensional analysis of the knowledge argument?

Recent influential accounts of temporal representation—the use of mental representations with explicit temporal contents, such as before and after relations and durations—sharply distinguish representation from mere sensitivity. A common, important picture of inter-temporal rationality is that it consists in maximizing total expected discounted utility across time. By analyzing reinforcement learning algorithms, this article shows that, given such notions of temporal representation and inter-temporal rationality, it would be possible for an agent to achieve inter-temporal rationality without temporal representation. It then explores (...) potential upshots of this result for theorizing about rationality and representation. (shrink)

Michael Jacovides For Locke, the first step in inquiring into perception should be reflection: “What Perception is, every one will know better by reflecting on what he does himself, when he sees, hears, feels, etc. or thinks, than by any discourse of mine” (2.9.2). As a second step, I say, we may learn from reading him. Locke’s use of the term ‘perception’ is somewhat broad. At one point, he tells us that “having Ideas and Perception” are “the same thing” (2.1.9). (...) Elsewhere, he includes the perceiving the agreement of ideas and perceiving the meaning of signs among the varieties of perception (2.21.5). What I have to say will be about perception as psychologists classify it nowadays. I will first discuss sensation in general and then elucidate some of the subtleties of Locke’s account of the visual perception of shape. I’ll close with some remarks on Locke account of time perception. (shrink)

I argue for constraining the nomological possibility space of temporal experiences and endorsing the Succession Requirement for agents. The Succession Requirement holds that the basic structure of temporal experience must be successive for agentive subjects, at least in worlds that are law-like in the same way as ours. I aim to establish the Succession Requirement by showing non-successively experiencing agents are not possible for three main reasons, namely that they fail to stand in the right sort of causal relationship to (...) the outcomes of their actions, exhibit the wrong sort of epistemic status for agency, and lack the requisite agentive mental attitude of intentionality. I conclude that agency is incompatible with non-successive experience and therefore we should view the successive temporal structure of experience as a necessary condition for agency. I also suggest that the Succession Requirement may actually extend beyond my main focus on agency, offering preliminary considerations in favor of seeing successive experience as a precondition for selfhood as well. The consequences of the Succession Requirement are wide-ranging, and I discuss various implications for our understanding of agency, the self, time consciousness, and theology, among other things. (shrink)

Shadworth Hodgson offers an account of how philosophy relates to science - both physical and psychological - in which three different conceptions of time can be identified. He distinguishes the methods of philosophy, involving analysis of the contents of immediate consciousness, and of science, which presumes the existence of the world of common sense. Hodgson holds that philosophical analysis of immediate consciousness, or the analysis of a present moment in the experience, provides the ultimate justification for knowledge in science. Time (...) as an object of study in science must be distinguished from the temporal structure of immediate consciousness. Time as a target of scientific study is thus differentiable into time in physical science, and time in psychology, where the temporal characteristics of consciousness can be studied, but only from a perspective external to that consciousness. Each of those scientific conceptions of time still presupposes and are evidentially dependent on the analysis of immediate consciousness, itself already temporal. The result is that time as a fundamental unit of experience could not, even in principle, conflict with time as studied in science, because it is presupposed by and the evidential base for claims about time in science. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers debating the rationality of time-biases have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. First, there is evidence that our third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing; given access to some information about the preference target, third-person (...) preferences mirror first-person preferences. As a result, the simulation hypothesis has been proposed, according to which third-person preferences will mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. Second, there is evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past (we are first-person negatively hedonically future-biased) only when we view future events as fixed and in no way under our control. By contrast, when we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis, and which aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the heuristic version of the hypothesis, but no support for the squirrelling version. (shrink)

It may be true that we are epistemically in the dark about various things. Does this fact ground the truth of fallibilism? No. Still, even the most zealous skeptic will probably grant that it is not clear that one can be incognizant of their own occurrent phenomenal conscious mental goings-on. Even so, this does not entail infallibilism. Philosophers who argue that occurrent conscious experiences play an important epistemic role in the justification of introspective knowledge assume that there are occurrent beliefs. (...) But this assumption is false. This paper argues that there are no occurrent beliefs. And it considers the epistemic consequences this result has for views that attempt to show that at least some phenomenal beliefs are infallible. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper addresses an underexplored puzzle about pictorial representation, a puzzle about how depiction of movement is possible. One aim is to clarify what the puzzle is. It might seem to concern a conflict between the nature of static surfaces and the dynamic things that they can depict. But the real conflict generating the puzzle is between the pictorial mode of presentation and what can be seen in pictures. A second aim of the paper is to solve the puzzle. (...) While many take it that depicting movement is to make visible something that has duration, I suggest that it is to make visible something atemporal. (shrink)

It has widely been assumed, by philosophers, that our first-person preferences regarding pleasurable and painful experiences exhibit a bias toward the future (positive and negative hedonic future-bias), and that our preferences regarding non-hedonic events (both positive and negative) exhibit no such bias (non-hedonic time-neutrality). Further, it has been assumed that our third-person preferences are always time-neutral. Some have attempted to use these (presumed) differential patterns of future-bias—different across kinds of events and perspectives—to argue for the irrationality of hedonic future-bias. This (...) paper experimentally tests these descriptive hypotheses. While as predicted we found first-person hedonic future-bias, we did not find that participants were time-neutral in all other conditions. Hence, the presumed asymmetry of hedonic/non-hedonic and first/third-person preferences cannot be used to argue for the irrationality of future-bias, since no such asymmetries exist. Instead, we develop a more fine-grained approach, according to which three factors—positive/negative valence, first/third-person, and hedonic/non-hedonic—each independently influence, but do not determine, whether an event is treated in a future-biased or time-neutral way. We discuss the upshots of these results for the debate over the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

As a growing area of research, the philosophy of time is increasingly relevant to different areas of philosophy and even other disciplines. This book describes and evaluates the most important debates in philosophy of time, under several subject areas: metaphysics, epistemology, physics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, rationality, and art. -/- Questions this book investigates include: Can we know what time really is? Is time possible, especially given modern physics? Must there be time because we cannot think (...) without it? What do we experience of time? How might philosophy of time be relevant to understanding the mind-body relationship or evidence in cognitive science? Can the philosophy of time help us understand biases toward the future and the fear of death? How is time relevant to art – and is art relevant to philosophical debates about time? Finally, what exactly could time travel be? And could time travel satisfy emotions such as nostalgia and regret? -/- Through asking such questions, and showing how they might be best answered, the book demonstrates the importance philosophy of time has in contemporary thought. Each of the book’s 10 chapters begins with a helpful introduction and ends with study questions and an annotated list of further readings. This and a comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book prepare the reader to go further in their study of the philosophy of time. (shrink)

Temporal non-dynamists hold that there is no temporal passage, but concede that many of us judge that it seems as though time passes. Phenomenal Illusionists suppose that things do seem this way, even though things are not this way. They attempt to explain how it is that we are subject to a pervasive phenomenal illusion. More recently, Cognitive Error Theorists have argued that our experiences do not seem that way; rather, we are subject to an error that leads us mistakenly (...) to believe that our experiences seem that way. Cognitive Error Theory is a relatively new view and little has been said to explain why we make such an error, or where, in the cognitive architecture, such an error might creep in. In this paper we remedy this by offering a number of hypotheses about the source of error. In so doing we aim to show that Cognitive Error Theory is a plausible competitor to Phenomenal Illusion Theory. (shrink)

Matthew Soteriou considers the kind of agency, and thus responsibility, that is involved in deciding to act, rather than in acting itself. One of his aims is to trace out connections between the notion that we occupy a tensed temporal perspective from which we regard the future as open, and the notion that we occupy a deliberative standpoint from which we act under the idea of freedom. A further aim is to suggest that identifying connections between the psychology of self-determination (...) and our temporal psychology should be central to an account of the sort of mental agency we exercise in deciding to act, and hence central to an account of what makes us responsible for our decisions. After having considered ways in which aspects of the psychology of our temporal perspective may contribute to explaining our capacity to exercise agency in deciding to act, Soteriou considers how our capacity to make decisions can contribute to explaining some of the distinctive features of the temporal perspective on the future that we occupy. In particular, he considers and responds to the suggestion that when it comes to our perspective on our future, there is a potential tension between the standpoint of theoretical reason and the standpoint of practical reason. (shrink)

It’s often claimed in the philosophical and scientific literature on temporal representation that there is no such thing as a genuine sensory system for time. In this paper, I argue for the opposite—many animals, including all mammals, possess a genuine sensory system for time based in the circadian system. In arguing for this conclusion, I develop a semantics and meta-semantics for explaining how the endogenous rhythms of the circadian system provide organisms with a direct information link to the temporal structure (...) of their environment. In doing so, I highlight the role of sensory systems in an information processing architecture. (shrink)

According to the thesis of temporal isomorphism, the experienced order of events in the world and the order in which experiences are processed in the brain are the same. The thesis is encompassed in the brain-time view, a popular view on the literature of the temporal illusions. The view is commonly contrasted with the event-time view, which maintains that the experienced order of events reflects the order in which the events occur in the world. This chapter focuses on the conflict (...) between the two views in the contexts of perceptual asymmetry in visual perception and temporal order judgment tasks. It is argued that both views mean slightly different things in these contexts. Accordingly, it is possible for one to endorse both the brain-time view and the event-time view at the same time. On the broader perspective, the chapter illustrates how time order is employed differently by various perceptual processes, resulting in different characteristics from implicit and explicit time perception. (shrink)

This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its relationship with the world. The existence of temporal illusions crucially challenges (...) the naïve assumption that we can simply infer the temporal nature of the world from experience. This anthology gathers eighteen original papers from current leading researchers in this subject, covering four broad and interdisciplinary topics: illusions of temporal passage, illusions and duration, illusions of temporal order and simultaneity, and the relationship between temporal illusions and the cognitive representation of time. (shrink)

It is well established that the temporal proximity of two events is a fundamental cue to causality. Recent research with adults has shown that this relation is bidirectional: events that are believed to be causally related are perceived as occurring closer together in time—the so‐called temporal binding effect. Here, we examined the developmental origins of temporal binding. Participants predicted when an event that was either caused by a button press, or preceded by a non‐causal signal, would occur. We demonstrate for (...) the first time that children as young as 4 years are susceptible to temporal binding. Binding occurred both when the button press was executed via intentional action, and when a machine caused it. These results suggest binding is a fundamental, early developing property of perception and grounded in causal knowledge. (shrink)

Phenomenologically speaking, we perceive the present, recall the past, and anticipate the future. We offer an account of the temporal content of the perceptual present that distinguishes it from the recalled past and the anticipated future. We distinguish two views: the Token Reflexive Account and the Minimal Account. We offer reasons to reject the Token Reflexive Account, and defend the Minimal Account, according to which the temporal content of the perceptual present is exhausted by its direct reference to the interval (...) of time over which it occurs. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of the paper is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of the influential verb typology developed by Zeno Vendler for recent debates in the philosophy of perception. Section one explains t...

A basic intuition we have regarding the nature of time is that the future is open whereas the past is fixed. For example, whereas we think that there are things we can do to affect how the future will unfold, we think that there are not things we can do to affect how the past unfolded. However, although this intuition is largely shared, it is not a straightforward matter to determine the nature of the asymmetry it reflects. So, in this (...) paper, I survey various philosophical ways of characterizing the asymmetry between the ‘open future’ and the ‘fixed past’ in order to account for our intuition. In particular, I wonder whether the asymmetry is to be characterized in semantic, epistemic, metaphysical or ontological terms. I conclude that, although many of these characterizations may contribute to a global understanding of the phenomenon, an ontological characterization of the asymmetry is to be preferred, since it is superior to the alternatives in explanatory power, intelligibility, and in how it coheres with interesting senses of openness. (shrink)

We focus on three main sets of topics emerging from the commentaries on our target article. First, we discuss several types of animal behavior that commentators cite as evidence against our claim that animals are restricted to temporal updating and cannot engage in temporal reasoning. In doing so, we illustrate further how explanations of behavior in terms of temporal updating work. Second, we respond to commentators’ queries about the developmental process through which children acquire a capacity for temporal reasoning and (...) about the relation between our account and accounts drawing similar distinctions in other domains of cognition. Finally, we address some broader theoretical issues arising from the commentaries, concerning in particular the question as to how our account relates to the phenomenology of experience in time, and the question as to whether our dichotomy between temporal reasoning and temporal updating is exhaustive, or whether there might be other forms of cognition or representation related to time not captured by it. (shrink)

We outline a dual systems approach to temporal cognition, which distinguishes between two cognitive systems for dealing with how things unfold over time – a temporal updating system and a temporal reasoning system – of which the former is both phylogenetically and ontogenetically more primitive than the latter, and which are at work alongside each other in adult human cognition. We describe the main features of each of the two systems, the types of behavior the more primitive temporal updating system (...) can support, and the respects in which it is more limited than the temporal reasoning system. We then use the distinction between the two systems to interpret findings in comparative and developmental psychology, arguing that animals operate only with a temporal updating system and that children start out doing so too, before gradually becoming capable of thinking and reasoning about time. After this, we turn to adult human cognition and suggest that our account can also shed light on a specific feature of our everyday thinking about time that has been the subject of debate in the philosophy of time, which consists in a tendency to think about the nature of time itself in a way that appears ultimately self-contradictory. We conclude by considering the topic of intertemporal choice, and argue that drawing the distinction between temporal updating and temporal reasoning is also useful in the context of characterising two distinct mechanisms for delaying gratification. (shrink)

Are there illusions of duration? Certainly, many experiences of an event’s duration differ from its measure in clock duration, the measure of that event in seconds, minutes, hours, and so forth. However, I argue that an illusory duration requires more than difference from a real duration; it requires difference from a duration that is relevant to experience. It is plausible to hold that there are many kinds of real duration and reason to question the relevance of all of them. In (...) particular, the interpretation of experienced duration as illusory is typical because it is compared to clock time; the experience of duration goes wrong by being different from a clock measurement of duration. However, I argue that clock duration is not obviously relevant to evaluating the experience of duration.In response, one might hold that it is plausible to evaluate experience by clock duration because clocks more closely match reality than experiences do; on the scale of experience, clock time is no different to real duration. It is not that experienced duration is an illusion because it is merely different from clock duration; it is an illusion because it is different from real duration and we know this because of its difference from clock duration. It is like illusions of size: some object seems to be a size it is not and we know this by comparing it to an object we can otherwise accurately measure by meters.However, unlike size illusions, it is not clear what the ‘real duration’ is against which we should evaluate apparent duration. What is meant by ‘real duration’ involves either an appeal to the duration of substantial absolute time or some kind of duration in things, for example, duration which is the measure of change in some kind of process. is an irrelevant duration; few positions hold that we experience absolute time. As for, if real duration is a measure of change, then, for experienced duration to match clock duration, they must both agree on the relevant change. If there is a difference in what is treated as the real duration, then neither experience nor clocks can be treated as evaluable in terms of the other.Finally, we may have an illusory duration because there are cases of variation between experiences of the same duration. Yet, even here, we may be misled; we may not be directly comparing experiences. We compare the experienced durations through first measuring each in terms of clock duration. If there is a variability in the relationship between clock standard and some relevant standard for experience, then one expects anything accurately meeting one standard to differ from anything accurately meeting the other. The error is holding there is a stable relationship between the standards. This error is not a matter of our experience of duration, and so is not an illusion of duration. (shrink)

Consider a toothache, or a feeling of intense pleasure, or the sensation you would have if you looked impassively at an expanse of colour. In each case, the experience can easily be thought to fill time by being present throughout a period. This way of thinking of conscious experience is natural enough, but it is in deep conflict with the view that physical processes are ultimately responsible for experience. The problem is that physical processes are related to durations in a (...) very different way—not by being wholly present at each instant or sub-period, but by having temporal parts that are. There is a choice to be made, therefore, between preserving this common way of thinking of experience and preserving the fundamentality of processes. The first option holds fixed the view of experiences as occurring throughout time and takes this to constrain the category of entity to which they are identical, or upon which they supervene. The second option abandons this common view of experience by taking up a perspective on which we experience things in the world and their properties as existing or occurring a certain way, and mistakenly ascribe this ontological character to our experience as well. The second option is ultimately the better option, however, since only it can make sense of the facts of our experience. (shrink)

A central debate in the current philosophical literature on temporal experience is over the following question: do temporal experiences themselves have a temporal structure that mirrors their temporal contents? Extensionalists argue that experiences do have a temporal structure that mirrors their temporal contents. Atomists insist that experiences don’t have a temporal structure that mirrors their contents. In this paper, I argue that this debate is misguided. Both atomism and extensionalism, considered as general theories of temporal experience, are false, since temporal (...) experience is not a single undifferentiated phenomena as both theories require. I argue for this conclusion in two steps. First, I show that introspection cannot settle the debate. Second, I argue that the neuroscientific evidence is best read as revealing a host of mechanisms involved in temporal perception - some admitting of an extensionalist interpretation while others admitting only of an atomistic interpretation. As a result, neither side of the debate wins. (shrink)

Most philosophers believe that we have experiences as of temporally extended phenomena like change, motion, and succession. Almost all theories of time consciousness explain these temporal experiences by subscribing to the doctrine of the specious present, the idea that the contents of our experiences embrace temporally extended intervals of time and are presented as temporally structured. Against these theories, I argue that the doctrine is false and present a theory that does not require the notion of a specious present. Furthermore, (...) I argue that the different aspects of temporal experiences arise from different mechanisms operating separately. If the theory is true, then temporal experiences do not tell us anything special about the nature of consciousness and its temporal properties per se. (shrink)

Philosophers frequently comment on the intimate connection there is between something’s being present in perceptual experience and that thing’s being, or at least appearing to be, temporally present. Yet, there is relatively little existing work that goes beyond asserting such a connection and instead examines its specific nature. In this paper, I suggest that we can make progress on the latter by looking at two more specific debates that have hitherto been conducted largely isolation from each other: one about the (...) nature of conscious experience and one about the nature of time itself. The first concerns the extent to which the temporal properties of experience form an exception to the transparency of experience, meaning that introspection can provide support for one particular view of how experience itself is structured temporally; the second concerns the question as to whether there is something about experience that gives us grounds for thinking that the present is somehow metaphysically special. As I argue, the idea of a connection between experiential presence and temporal presence plays a key background role in each of these debates. Yet it can also, in each of them, be seen to draw one side towards making claims that are supposed to express an important truth but are at the same time, on the face of it, self-contradictory. In each case, resolving what it actually is that these claims are trying to get at turns on recognizing a distinctive feature of perceptual experience, which I refer to as its lack of temporal viewpointedness. Recognising this feature also helps in making sense of what the issues at stake actually are in the intuition of an intimate connection between experiential presence and temporal presence. (shrink)

Arendt’s concept of experience can contribute in important ways to the contemporary debates in political and feminist theory. However, while the notion is ubiquitous in Arendt’s thinking we lack an understanding of experience as a concept, as opposed to the impact of Arendt’s personal experiences on her thought. Drawing from her notes for “Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century,” the article seeks to enrich our understanding of the Janus-faced character of political experience. It emphasizes the importance of vicariousness, and argues (...) that experience should be understood as a process of suffering, enduring, and re-experiencing events beyond our conscious control. The article further posits that experience appear only when events, through metaphors, are allowed to leave their mark on our way of using language. It is argued that this concept poses an important challenge to the different ways experience is approached in contemporary political and feminist theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that applying the mental files framework for singular thought to thoughts about specific times could produce an account of tensed thought with significant advantages over competing theories. After describing the framework and motivating the paper, I discuss the possible make-up and function of a NOW indexical mental file. The last section argues that, if all ‘now’ thoughts can be coherently analyzed as thinking of a time under the NOW file, one would have a plausible explanation of the (...) following issues: how the thought can refer to extended temporal intervals of various length; why reference to times is not destroyed by thought delays; and how a ‘now’ thought results in timely actions and relief. (shrink)

This chapter offers a overview of Shadworth Hodgson's account of experience as fundamentally temporal, an account that was deeply influential on thinkers such as William James and which prefigures the phenomenology of Husserl in many ways. I highlight eight key features that are characteristic of Hodgson's account, and how they hang together to provide a coherent overall picture of experience and knowledge. Hodgson's account is then compared to Husserl's, and I argue that Hodgson's account offers a better target for projects (...) such as neurophenomenology than does Husserl's. Hodgson's account is historically important as a culmination of a certain trajectory of British Empiricist thought. It offers a substantive alternative for how to think about temporality and experience in contemporary discussions, not just of the present moment but of the relationship between experience and knowledge more broadly. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss some ways in which debates about temporal experience intersect with wider debates about the nature of perception in general. In particular, I suggest that bearing in mind some general questions about the nature of perception can help with demarcating different theoretical approaches to temporal experience. Much of the current debate about temporal experience in philosophy is framed in terms of a debate between three specific main positions sometimes referred to as the extensional model, the retentional (...) model and the cinematic model. It is typically assumed that the differences between these three models are obvious. Yet, on closer inspection, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to make out what exactly distinguishes the cinematic model from the extensional one, on the one hand, and from the retentional model, on the other. I criticise some existing ways in which the models are sometimes demarcated from one another, before suggesting that the differences between the three views become clearer if the debate between them is seen as turning on contrasting pictures of the nature of perceptual experience they embody. (shrink)

Is temporal representation constitutively necessary for perception? Tyler Burge (2010) argues that it is, in part because perception requires a form of memory sufficiently sophisticated as to require temporal representation. I critically discuss Burge’s argument, maintaining that it does not succeed. I conclude by reflecting on the consequences for the origins of temporal representation.

For many years, the importance and significance of Brentano’s conception of time-consciousness in contemporary philosophy was closely tied with Husserl’s adaptation of this conception in his own lectures on time-consciousness. These lectures, which Husserl held in Göttingen in 1904-05, were edited in the 1920s by the brilliant phenomenologist Edith Stein and are the source of many of the central ideas of transcendental phenomenology. In April 1926, Stein’s work was then taken over by Martin Heidegger, a young careerist who, after spending (...) some years as Husserl’s assistant in Freiburg, took over many of Husserl’s ideas and published a volume on being and time that would convince Husserl to choose him as his successor. Soon enough, and thanks to the publication of Husserl’s lectures, “Brentano’s conception of time-consciousness” became the heading of a supposedly surpassed and defective theory, which was to be replaced subsequently by transcendental phenomenology and its heirs in Freiburg and later in France. This brief and quite tragic history of the reception of Brentano’s conception of time-consciousness has meanwhile been rectified to some extent by a number of works that offer a less biased picture of Brentano’s various conceptions of time-consciousness. The picture remains incomplete, however, without a consideration of the motivations behind the different conceptions advocated by Brentano. By taking Brentano’s metaphysical views into account as his background motivation, it is possible to draw a comprehensive picture of the different conceptions he defended and to get around the uneasy division of his works into early and ‘mature’ views, which has often been taken as a starting point for assessing the importance of reism (see CHAP. 13) at the expense of the rest of his works. While such divisions may be historically justified, they tend to hide the forest behind the trees. For this reason, I will first start with a description of the forest (§§2-3) to finish with a classification of the trees (§4). (shrink)

According to the snapshot view of temporal experience, instances of movement and change cannot, strictly speaking, be objects of sensory perception. Perceptual consciousness instead consists of a succession of individual momentary experiences, none of which is itself an experience of movement or change. The snapshot view is often presented as an intuitively appealing view of the nature of temporal experience, even by philosophers who ultimately reject it. Yet, it is puzzling how this can be so, given that its central claim (...) – that we can never just perceive things moving or changing – clearly flies in the face of our common sense view of the phenomenology of experience. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis of how it is possible that the deep conflict between the snapshot view and our phenomenological intuitions can sometimes go unnoticed. The materials for this diagnosis can, I think, be found in some passages in Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, in which he criticises John Locke’s account of the origins of the idea of succession, as presented in chapter 14 of book II of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. As I argue, a crucial aspect of Reid’s criticisms can be seen to turn on the idea that Locke fails to distinguish between two quite different variants of the snapshot view, which I call the memory theory and the mirroring theory of temporal experience, respectively. It is the failure to distinguish between these two different variants of the snapshot view, I suggest, that can also make the snapshot view appear more compatible with our phenomenological intuitions than it in fact is. (shrink)

The grounding objection to presentism rests on two premises: (i) every true proposition P has a truthmaker T, and (ii) some claims about the future and past are obviously true. However, if the future and past do not exist, there can be no truthmakers for future and past tensed expressions. Presentists tend not to challenge the premises of the objection. Instead they argue that the present contains all the truthmakers we need. Presentists should challenge the premises instead. First, finding truthmakers (...) in the present only results in the postulation of implausible and/or ethereal entities that ultimately fail to solve the grounding objection. Second, no manifestly absurd consequences follow from accepting the lack of truth-values for tensed expressions. Third, the grounding objection does not just require the assumption that for every truth there is a truthmaker, but also that for every truthmaker there is a truth. I show how one can deny the latter without denying the former. (shrink)

In this paper we describe a few interrelated issues for validating theories that posit levels of consciousness. First, validating levels of consciousness requires consensus about the ordering of conscious states, which cannot be easily achieved. This problem is particularly severe if we believe conscious states can be irreducibly smeared over time. Second, the relationship between conscious states is probably sometimes intransitive, which means levels of consciousness will not be amenable to a single continuous measure. Finally, even if a multidimensional approach (...) to levels of consciousness is adopted, we argue that there are further problems for its validation. (shrink)

Overview of some of the key philosophical problems encountered making sense of the notion of "subjective time", with a focus on the experience of duration. The paper unpacks some of the assumptions behind an intuitive picture of duration experience I call the "simple flow" view, highlighting the availability of alternative models. It then considers a number of obstacles to providing an account of the individuation of subjective features of duration experience.

This paper uses a paradox inherent in any solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness to argue for God’s existence. The paper assumes we are “thought machines”, reading the state of a relevant physical medium and then outputting corresponding thoughts. However, the existence of such a thought machine is impossible, since it needs an infinite number of point-representing sensors to map the physical world to conscious thought. This paper shows that these sensors cannot exist, and thus thought cannot come solely (...) from our physical world. The only possible explanation is something outside, argued to be God. (shrink)

An introduction to a special interdisciplinary issue on time consciousness of The Journal of Consciousness Studies. I briefly describe the importance of time for thinking about consciousness, including some of the relevant issues in the philosophy of time. Then I introduce the papers in the volume.

I describe a thought experiment in which an agent must choose between suffering a greater pain in the past or a lesser pain in the future. This case demonstrates that the ‘temporal value asymmetry’ – our disposition to attribute greater significance to future pleasures and pains than to past – can have consequences for the rationality of actions as well as attitudes. This fact, I argue, blocks attempts to vindicate the temporal value asymmetry as a useful heuristic tied to the (...) asymmetry of causation. Since the two standard arguments for the rationality of the temporal value asymmetry appeal to causal asymmetry and the passage of time respectively, the failure of the causal asymmetry explanation suggests that the B-theory, which rejects temporal passage, has substantial revisionary implications concerning our attitudes toward past and future experience. (shrink)

This chapter explores to what extent some core ideas of predictive processing can be applied to the phenomenology of time consciousness. The focus is on the experienced continuity of consciously perceived, temporally extended phenomena (such as enduring processes and successions of events). The main claim is that the hierarchy of representations posited by hierarchical predictive processing models can contribute to a deepened understanding of the continuity of consciousness. Computationally, such models show that sequences of events can be represented as states (...) of a hierarchy of dynamical systems. Phenomenologically, they suggest a more fine-grained analysis of the perceptual contents of the specious present, in terms of a hierarchy of temporal wholes. Visual perception of static scenes not only contains perceived objects and regions but also spatial gist; similarly, auditory perception of temporal sequences, such as melodies, involves not only perceiving individual notes but also slightly more abstract features (temporal gist), which have longer temporal durations (e.g., emotional character or rhythm). Further investigations into these elusive contents of conscious perception may be facilitated by findings regarding its neural underpinnings. Predictive processing models suggest that sensorimotor areas may influence these contents. (shrink)

We do things in time. Philosophy of action can capture this phenomenon in at least two ways. On one hand, it might focus on the way that temporal preferences and long-term temporal horizons affect the rationality of decisions in the present (see, e.g., Parfit 1984; Rawls 1971). Such work may focus on the way we discount the distant future, for example, or prioritize the future over the past. Approaches of this kind treat time as, in a sense, something external to (...) agency; it sets various constraints on what we may rationally intend, for example. But if temporal considerations can constrain agency, it follows that they can also structure it internally, and if they can do so, it seems likely that this is possible because agency is already temporally structured. This volume focuses on the way that agency is temporally structured from within, such that time is an ineliminable constituent of agency. (shrink)

Apparent motion is an illusion in which two sequentially presented and spatially separated stimuli give rise to the experience of one moving stimulus. This phenomenon has been deployed in various philosophical arguments for and against various theories of consciousness, time consciousness and the ontology of time. Nevertheless, philosophers have continued working within a framework that does not reflect the current understanding of apparent motion. The main objectives of this paper are to expose the shortcomings of the explanations provided for apparent (...) motion and to offer an alternative explanation for the phenomenon. (shrink)

Endurantism, as opposed to perdurantism, is supposed to be the intuitive view. But the ‘endurantist intuition’ – roughly, that objects persist through time by being numerically identical and wholly located at all times at which they exist – is behind more than just endurantism. Indeed, it plays an important role in the motivation of some theories about the passage of time, and some theories about the nature of the subject. As we shall see, the endurantist intuition is often taken in (...) these cases to be a reason, or at least a motivation, to endorse one or the other of these metaphysical theories. Sometimes, it is even said to constitute a basis for an argument in their favour. In this article, I show that such an appeal to this ‘endurantist intuition’ is misleading and wrong. I do not deny that there is an intuition of this kind, but I deny that it can play any philosophically significant role as a reason – and even less as a basis for an argument – in defending metaphysical theories such as endurantism, dualism, or the A-theory. (shrink)

Patients suffering from the Cotard syndrome can deny being alive, having guts, thinking or even existing. They can also complain that the world or time have ceased to exist. In this article, I argue that even though the leading neurocognitive accounts have difficulties meeting that task, we should, and we can, make sense of these bizarre delusions. To that effect, I draw on the close connection between the Cotard syndrome and a more common condition known as depersonalisation. Even though they (...) are not delusional, depersonalised patients seem to have experiences that are quite similar to those of Cotard patients. I argue that these experiences are essentially characterised by a lack of subjective character and of two other structural features of experience, which I call ‘the present character’ and ‘the actual character’. Cotard's nihilistic delusions simply consist in taking these anomalous experiences at face value. (shrink)

The nature of temporal experience is typically explained in one of a small number of ways, most are versions of either retentionalism or extensionalism. After describing these, I make a distinction between two kinds of temporal character that could structure temporal experience: A-ish contents are those that present events as structured in past/present/future terms, and B-ish contents are those that present events as structured in earlier-than/later-than/simultaneous-with relations. There are a few exceptions, but most of the literature ignores this distinction, and (...) silently assumes temporal experience is A-ish. I then argue that temporal character is not scale invariant, but rather that temporal experience is A-ish at larger scales, and B-ish at smaller scales. I then point out that this scale non-invariance opens the possibility of hybrid views. I clarify my own view as a hybrid view, according to which temporal experience is B-ish at small scales – and at this scale my trajectory estimation model applies – but A-ish at larger scales, and at the larger scale my TEM does not apply. I then motivate this hybrid position by first defending it against arguments that have tried to show that the TEM is untenable. Since the hybrid view has TEM as its small-scale component, it must address this objection. I then put pressure on the main alternative account, extentionalism, by showing that its proponents have not adequately dealt with the problem of temporal illusions. The result is a new theory motivated by i) explaining its virtues, ii) showing that objections to it can be met, and iii) showing that objections to its main competitors have not been met. (shrink)

In this chapter we examine the tendency to view future-oriented mental time travel as a unitary faculty that, despite task-driven surface variation, ultimately reduces to a common phenomenological state. We review evidence that FMTT is neither unitary nor beholden to episodic memory: Rather, it is varied both in its memorial underpinnings and experiential realization. We conclude that the phenomenological diversity characterizing FMTT is dependent not on the type of memory activated during task performance, but on the kind of subjective temporality (...) associated with the memory in play. (shrink)

This article presents an argument for the view that we can perceive temporal features without awareness. Evidence for this claim comes from recent empirical work on selective visual attention. An interpretation of selective attention as a mechanism that processes high-level perceptual features is offered and defended against one particular objection. In conclusion, time perception likely has an unconscious dimension and temporal mental qualities can be instantiated without ever being conscious.