Abstract
Philosophers have usually approached the concept of timing of experiences by addressing the question how the experiences of temporal phenomena can be explained. As a result, the issue of timing has been addressed in two different ways. The first, similar to the questions posed in sciences, concerns the relationship between the experienced time of events and the objective time of events. The second approach is more specific to philosophers’ debates, and concerns the phenomenology of experiences: how is the apparent temporal structure of experiences constituted? In regard to both questions, this article shows why and how philosophers’ views differ from those held by most scientists. To conclude, I present a combination of views that is not only compatible with that of scientists, but also addresses the problems that engage philosophers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
By experience I mean the whole phenomenology of one’s subjectively experienced moment regardless of whether that moment is subjectively speaking temporally extended or not. If not otherwise mentioned, (experiential) content refers to a conscious inner occurrence that is an individual element of an experience.
- 2.
Rick Grush (2008) refers to the similar view as the standard view. There are, however, two differences between the views. First, Grush is “not concerned with” the small processing delays and thus do not differentiate between minimal delay and extra delay positions as regards the thesis of minimal delay. Second, whereas the thesis of temporal isomorphism is understood here as a claim that concerns the experienced temporal order of events and the temporal order of neural processes realizing these experiences, Grush makes this an issue of passive registration versus active construction of experiences. Given that one endorsing the simple view can hold both active and passive views on perceptual experiences, Grush’s claim is an additional issue within the thesis of temporal isomorphism.
- 3.
The thesis of temporal isomorphism is not the same as the inheritance principle, which states that an experience possesses the same temporal properties as those which are apparently presented in the experience (Phillips 2014a, b). For example, while the thesis of temporal isomorphism concerns the temporal relation between an experiential content and its neural basis, the inheritance principle concerns the relationship between an experience and what is being experienced. That is, the inheritance principle does not take a stance on the neural processing. Then again, since the thesis of temporal isomorphism concerns the experiential contents, not experiences per se, it does not take a stance on the temporal structure of experiences. Moreover, whereas the snapshot view makes the inheritance principle trivially true, it does not make the thesis of temporal isomorphism true. Finally, while the inheritance principle has been used in arguments for the extensionalist model and against the retentionalist model, the thesis of temporal isomorphism is neutral between the models. (One could argue, for example, that the thesis holds for the primal images but not for retained contents because the latter are not really experiential contents.) See also Soteriou (2010), Hoerl (2013), Lee (2014). The claims discussed in these papers are not exactly the same as the inheritance principle, however. For example, Lee (2014) discusses the mirroring view and explicitly associates it with the idea that temporal experiences unfold over time. Hence, unlike the inheritance principle, the mirroring view would be incorrect as regards the snapshot view.
- 4.
This position is (often implicitly) held by scientists working on, for example, the perceptual simultaneity (Kopinska and Harris 2004), duration estimation and reproduction (Reutimann et al. 2004; Wittmann et al. 2010), and the flash-lag effect (Whitney and Murakami 1998; Whitney et al. 2000). For other examples, see Pfeuty et al. (2005); Arnold and Wilcock (2007); Arstila (2015a).
- 5.
Grush’s view resembles Dennett and Kinsbourne’s idea of Orwellian revision. However, Grush maintains that the experience of the empty screen is revised, whereas in Orwellian revision it is the memory of the empty screen that is revised.
- 6.
Grush argues that our behavior in the world would be more effective if the processing delays were compensated for. Nijhawan (1994) likewise proposes that our sensory system extrapolates the trajectory of a moving stimulus, and this extrapolated position is what we experience. For a similar suggestion, see also (Changizi et al. 2008). It is worth noticing, however, that the compensated processing delays themselves cannot account for the postdiction effects when the effects occur in situations that cannot be predicted beforehand.
- 7.
For a more detailed discussion on the apparent motion and different explanations for it, see (Arstila 2015b).
- 8.
In accordance with this, Gallagher (2009, 200) points out that “[if] we say that the phenomenal contents have an intrinsic flow structure, is that anything more than saying that consciousness itself just has an intrinsic flow structure?”
- 9.
E.g., James (1890, 630) argues that the “intuited duration, stands permanent” although its contents are in constant flux. Likewise, Gallagher (2009, 200) argues that according to the retentionalist model, which he holds, retention is “not a particular thing in consciousness” but a structural aspect of consciousness that together with other aspects “is taken to be one of the things that require explanation.” See also Dainton (2000, 2008).
- 10.
Thus the theories of the first class need to explain empirical results which suggest that we can tell that two auditory stimuli are asynchronous, but cannot tell their temporal order. This can be done, for example, by arguing that performance in these experiments is not based on the experienced temporal properties per se. Instead, they could be based on (i) a difference in the perceived spatial locations of synchronous and synchronous stimuli, or (ii) the two stimuli appearing different in some other respect.
- 11.
The first one, for example, must answer the question of whether or not there needs to be a mechanism responsible for interpreting the time markers and determining the order or time of events. The second one, for example, must tell how a single experiential content can be experienced to have duration, given that in this case there are no relative temporal markers that bring about the temporal structure. Clearly, these issues do not refute the view but only illustrate that the notion of time markers remains underspecified by philosophers (and scientists).
- 12.
The dissociation of experienced motion and position of an object is well supported by the studies showing that it is possible to experience stimulus as moving in one direction while its position is experienced as shifting in the opposite direction (Bulakowski et al. 2007).
- 13.
This issue depends on what is meant by pure causality. If it means the impression of causality in the absence of the perception of any “causing” stimulus, then it has not been investigated. However, if pure causality refers to the impression of causality in situations where we would not normally claim that cause-effect relationship holds, then it is shown to exist. Consider, for example, perceptual causality experiments in which subjects are shown one moving stimulus (A) and two stationary stimuli (B and C). If A collides with B and B begins to move, it is easy to see why people say that A caused B to move. However, if it is C (not B) that begins to move when A collides with B, then the cause-effect relationship is more susceptible. Yet, people report having an experience of causality in these latter cases as well.
- 14.
The views about the function of the two types of reentrant loops differ. In Victor Lamme’s theory (2004, 2006) local reentrant processing brings about phenomenally conscious states, which is what Ned Block calls phenomenality (2007, 2011). In the global workspace theory, it amounts to unconscious perception (Dehaene et al. 2006; Dehaene and Changeux 2011). In both theories, global reentrant loops bring about cognitive access to the sensory qualities that have been processed within localized reentrant loops. Given the difference regarding the nature of the local reentrant processing, the explanation of the postdiction effects based on this difference may already concern the level of unconscious perception.
- 15.
It should be mentioned though that the idea that the recurrent processing plays a role in apparent motion also receives support from the fact that such processing has been postulated to play a role in other postdiction effects as well. For instance, many theories of the metacontrast masking incorporate it, see Bridgeman (1980), Enns and Lollo (1997, 2000), Di Lollo et al. (2000), Visser and Enns (2001), Lamme et al. (2002), Fahrenfort et al. (2007), and Ro et al. (2003). See Arstila (forthcoming) for the more thorough explication of the non-linear latency difference view and how it accounts for the flash-lag effect and the metacontrast masking.
- 16.
In the retinotopic coordinate system, the location of a stimulus represents the location of corresponding cells in the retina. This system needs to be separated from the egocentric coordinate system that corresponds to the experienced location of things. When you are reading this text and your eyes move, for example, the retinotopic positions of the words and the page change. Nevertheless, you do not experience them as moving because, in an egocentric coordinate system, they continue to have the same positions in relation to yourself. The retina and early visual areas (including V1 and V5) are retinotopic.
References
Arnold, Derek H., and Paul Wilcock. 2007. Cortical processing and perceived timing. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 274: 2331–2336.
Arstila, Valtteri. 2011. Further steps in the science of temporal consciousness? In Multidisciplinary aspects of time and time perception, ed. Argiro Vatakis, Anna Esposito, Maria Giagkou, Fred Cummins, and Georgios Papadelis, 1–10. Dordrecht: Springer.
Arstila, Valtteri. 2015a. Defense of the brain time view. Frontiers of Psychology 6(1350). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01350.
Arstila, Valtteri. 2015b. Theories of apparent motion. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. doi:10.1007/s11097-015-9418-y.
Arstila, Valtteri. Forthcoming. Keeping postdiction simple. Consciousness and Cognition.
Azzopardi, Paul, and Howard S. Hock. 2011. Illusory motion perception in blindsight. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108: 876–881.
Block, Ned. 2007. Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30: 481–499; discussion 499–548.
Block, Ned. 2011. Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15: 567–575.
Blythe, Isobel M., Jane M. Bromley, Christopher Kennard, and K.H. Ruddock. 1986. Visual discrimination of target displacement remains after damage to the striate cortex in humans. Nature 320: 619–621.
Breitmeyer, Bruno G., Tony Ro, and Neel S. Singhal. 2004. Unconscious color priming occurs at stimulus- not percept-dependent levels of processing. Psychological Science 15: 198–202.
Bridgeman, Bruce. 1980. Temporal response characteristics of cells in monkey striate cortex measured with metacontrast masking and brightness discrimination. Brain Research 196: 347–364.
Broad, Charles Dunbar. 1938. An examination of McTaggart’s philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bulakowski, Paul F., Kami Koldewyn, and David Whitney. 2007. Independent coding of object motion and position revealed by distinct contingent aftereffects. Vision Research 47: 810–817.
Busch, Niko A., Ingo Fründ, and Christoph S. Herrmann. 2010. Electrophysiological evidence for different types of change detection and change blindness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22: 1852–1869.
Changizi, Mark, Andrew Hsieh, Romi Nijhawan, Ryota Kanai, and Shinsuke Shimojo. 2008. Perceiving the present and a systematization of illusions. Cognitive Science 32: 459–503.
Dainton, Barry. 2000. Stream of consciousness: Unity and continuity in conscious experience. London: Routledge.
Dainton, Barry. 2008. The experience of time and change. Philosophy Compass 3(4): 619–638.
Dainton, Barry. 2010a. Temporal consciousness. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-temporal/. Accessed 14 June 2014.
Dainton, Barry. 2010b. Temporal consciousness; Supplement: Interpreting temporal illusions. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-temporal/temporal-illusions.html. Accessed 14 June 2014.
Dehaene, Stanislas, and Jean-Pierre Changeux. 2011. Experimental and theoretical approaches to conscious processing. Neuron 70: 200–227.
Dehaene, Stanislas, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Lionel Naccache, Jérôme Sackur, and Claire Sergent. 2006. Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: A testable taxonomy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10: 204–211.
Del Cul, Antoine, Sylvain Baillet, and Stanislas Dehaene. 2007. Brain dynamics underlying the nonlinear threshold for access to consciousness. PLoS Biology 5: e260.
Dennett, Daniel. 1992. “Filling in” versus finding out: A ubiquitous confusion in cognitive science. In Cognition: Conceptual and methodological issues, ed. L. Herbert Jr., Paulus Willem van den Broek, and David C. Knill, 33–49. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Dennett, Daniel, and Marcel Kinsbourne. 1992. Time and the observer. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15: 183–247.
Di Lollo, Vincent, James T. Enns, and Ronald A. Rensink. 2000. Competition for consciousness among visual events: The psychophysics of reentrant visual processes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 129: 481–507.
Eagleman, David M. 2010. How does the timing of neural signals map onto the timing of perception? In Space and time in perception and action, ed. Romi Nijhawan and Beena Khurana, 216–231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eagleman, David M., and Terrence J. Sejnowski. 2000. Motion integration and postdiction in visual awareness. Science 287: 2036–2038.
Eagleman, David M., and Terrence J. Sejnowski. 2007. Motion signals bias localization judgments: A unified explanation for the flash-lag, flash-drag, flash-jump, and Frohlich illusions. Journal of Vision 7: 1–12.
Enns, James T., and Vincent Di Lollo. 1997. Object substitution: A new form of masking in unattended visual locations. Psychological Science 8: 135–140.
Enns, James T., and Vincent Di Lollo. 2000. What’s new in visual masking? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4: 345–352.
Fahrenfort, Johannes J., H. Steven Scholte, and Victor A.F. Lamme. 2007. Masking disrupts reentrant processing in human visual cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19: 1488–1497.
Ffytche, Dominic H., C.N. Guy, and Semir Zeki. 1995. The parallel visual motion inputs into areas V1 and V5 of human cerebral cortex. Brain 118: 1375–1394.
Fonlupt, Pierre. 2003. Perception and judgement of physical causality involve different brain structures. Brain Research 17: 248–254.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2009. Consciousness of time and the time of consciousness. In Elsevier encyclopedia of consciousness, ed. William Banks, 193–204. London: Elsevier.
Grush, Rick. 2005. Internal models and the construction of time: Generalizing from state estimation to trajectory estimation to address temporal features of perception, including temporal illusions. Journal of Neural Engineering 2: S209–S218.
Grush, Rick. 2007. Time and experience. In Philosophie der Zeit, ed. Thomas Müller, 27–44. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Grush, Rick. 2008. Temporal representation and dynamics. New Ideas in Psychology 26: 146–157.
Hoerl, Christoph. 2013. A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. Mind 122: 373–417.
Hoerl, Christoph. 2015. Seeing motion and apparent motion. European Journal of Philosophy 23(3): 676–702. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00565.x.
Holmes, Gordon. 1918. Disturbances of visual orientation. The British Journal of Ophthalmology 2(9): 449–468.
Husserl, Edmund. 1991. On the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time (1893–1917). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
James, William. 1890. The principles of psychology. New York: Dover.
Johnston, Alan, and Shinya Nishida. 2001. Time perception: Brain time or event time? Current Biology 11: R427–R430.
Kiverstein, Julian, and Valtteri Arstila. 2013. Time in mind. In Blackwell companion to the philosophy of time, ed. Adrian Bardon and Heather Dyke, 444–469. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Koivisto, Mika, and Antti Revonsuo. 2010. Event-related brain potential correlates of visual awareness. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 34: 922–934.
Kopinska, Agnieszka, and Laurence R. Harris. 2004. Simultaneity constancy. Perception 33: 1049–1060.
Kouider, Sid. 2009. Neurobiological theories of consciousness. In Encyclopedia of consciousness, vol. 2, ed. William P. Banks, 87–100. Oxford: Academic.
Lamme, Victor A.F. 2004. Separate neural definitions of visual consciousness and visual attention; a case for phenomenal awareness. Neural Networks 17: 861–872.
Lamme, Victor A.F. 2006. Towards a true neural stance on consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10: 494–501.
Lamme, Victor A.F., Karl Zipser, and Henk Spekreijse. 2002. Masking interrupts figure—Ground signals in V1. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 14: 1044–1053.
Larsen, Axel, Kristoffer H. Madsen, Torben E. Lund, and Claus Bundesen. 2006. Images of illusory motion in primary visual cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18: 1174–1180.
Le Poidevin, Robin. 2007. The images of time: An essay on temporal representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lee, Geoffrey. 2014. Extensionalism, atomism, and continuity. In Debates in the metaphysics of time, ed. L. Nathan Oaklander, 149–173. London: Bloomsbury.
Mellor, David Hugh. 1998. Real time II. London: Routledge.
Mölder, Bruno. 2014a. Constructing time: Dennett and Grush on temporal representation. In Subjective time: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of temporality, ed. Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd, 217–238. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Mölder, Bruno. 2014b. How philosophical models explain time consciousness. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 126: 48–57.
Muckli, Lars, Axel Kohler, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, and Wolf Singer. 2005. Primary visual cortex activity along the apparent-motion trace reflects illusory perception. PLoS Biology 3: e265.
Nijhawan, Romi. 1994. Motion extrapolation in catching. Nature 370: 256–257.
Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, and Vincent Walsh. 2001. Fast backprojections from the motion to the primary visual area necessary for visual awareness. Science 292: 510–512.
Paul, Laurie A. 2010. Temporal experience. Journal of Philosophy 107: 333–359.
Pelczar, Michael. 2010. Must an appearance of succession involve a succession of appearances? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81: 49–63.
Pfeuty, Micha, Richard Ragot, and Viviane Pouthas. 2005. Relationship between CNV and timing of an upcoming event. Neuroscience Letters 382: 106–111.
Phillips, Ian. 2014a. The temporal structure of experience. In Subjective time: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of temporality, ed. Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd, 139–158. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Phillips, Ian. 2014b. Experience of and in time. Philosophy Compass 9: 131–144.
Railo, Henry, Mika Koivisto, and Antti Revonsuo. 2011. Tracking the processes behind conscious perception: A review of event-related potential correlates of visual consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition 20: 972–983.
Rensink, Ronald A. 2004. Visual sensing without seeing. Psychological Science 15: 27–32.
Reutimann, Jan, Volodya Yakovlev, Stefano Fusi, and Walter Senn. 2004. Climbing neuronal activity as an event-based cortical representation of time. The Journal of Neuroscience 24: 3295–3303.
Ro, Tony, Bruno G. Breitmeyer, Philip Burton, Neel S. Singhal, and David Lane. 2003. Feedback contributions to visual awareness in human occipital cortex. Current Biology 11: 1038–1041.
Scholte, H. Steven, Jacob Jolij, Johannes J. Fahrenfort, and Victor A.F. Lamme. 2008. Feedforward and recurrent processing in scene segmentation: Electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20: 2097–2109.
Schwiedrzik, Caspar M., Arjen Alink, Axel Kohler, Wolf Singer, and Lars Muckli. 2007. A spatio-temporal interaction on the apparent motion trace. Vision Research 47: 3424–3433.
Sergent, Claire, Sylvain Baillet, and Stanislas Dehaene. 2005. Timing of the brain events underlying access to consciousness during the attentional blink. Nature Neuroscience 8: 1391–1400.
Shapley, Robert. 2004. A new view of the primary visual cortex. Neural Networks 17: 615–623.
Silvanto, Juha, Alan Cowey, Nilli Lavie, and Vincent Walsh. 2005. Striate cortex (V1) activity gates awareness of motion. Nature Neuroscience 8: 143–144.
Sincich, Lawrence C., Ken F. Park, Melville J. Wohlgemuth, and Jonathan C. Horton. 2004. Bypassing V1: A direct geniculate input to area MT. Nature Neuroscience 7: 1123–1128.
Soteriou, Matthew. 2010. Perceiving events. Philosophical Explorations 13: 233–241.
Sterzer, Philipp, John-Dylan Haynes, and Geraint Rees. 2006. Primary visual cortex activation on the path of apparent motion is mediated by feedback from hMT+/V5. NeuroImage 32: 1308–1316.
Todd, Steven J. 2009. A difference that makes a difference: Passing through Dennett’s Stalinesque/Orwellian impasse. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60: 497–520.
Visser, Troy A.W., and James T. Enns. 2001. The role of attention in temporal integration. Perception 30: 135–145.
Whitney, David, and Ikuya Murakami. 1998. Latency difference, not spatial extrapolation. Nature Neuroscience 1: 656–657.
Whitney, David, Ikuya Murakami, and Patrick Cavanagh. 2000. Illusory spatial offset of a flash relative to a moving stimulus is caused by differential latencies for moving and flashed stimuli. Vision Research 40: 137–149.
Wibral, Michael, Christoph Bledowski, Axel Kohler, Wolf Singer, and Lars Muckli. 2009. The timing of feedback to early visual cortex in the perception of long-range apparent motion. Cerebral Cortex 19: 1567–1582.
Wittmann, Marc, Alan N. Simmons, Jennifer L. Aron, and Martin P. Paulus. 2010. Accumulation of neural activity in the posterior insula encodes the passage of time. Neuropsychologia 48: 3110–3120.
Yantis, Steven, and Takehiko Nakama. 1998. Visual interactions in the path of apparent motion. Nature Neuroscience 1: 508–512.
Yarrow, Kielan, Nina Jahn, Szonya Durant, and Derek H. Arnold. 2011. Shifts of criteria or neural timing? The assumptions underlying timing perception studies. Consciousness and Cognition 20(4): 1518–1531. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2011.07.003.
Zeki, Semir. 2003. The disunity of consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 214–218.
Zeki, Semir. 2007. A theory of micro-consciousness. In The Blackwell companion to consciousness, ed. Max Velmans and Susan Schneider, 580–588. Oxford: Blackwell.
Zeki, Semir, and Andreas Bartels. 1999. Toward a theory of visual consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition 8: 225–259.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for Christoph Hoerl, Dan Lloyd, Julian Kiverstein, Kielan Yarrow, and Marc Wittmann for stimulating discussions on these and related issues over the years. I want to thank also two anonymous referees for their thorough and helpful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Arstila, V. (2016). The Time of Experience and the Experience of Time. In: Mölder, B., Arstila, V., Øhrstrøm, P. (eds) Philosophy and Psychology of Time. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22195-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22195-3_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22194-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22195-3
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)