Time Consciousness and the Specious Present

Roger Penrose, in The Emperor's New Mind (1989), writes about the way Mozart perceived music. Mozart did not play a piece in his mind in real time, or even speeded up, but could hold it before him all at once. We all do this, although usually for much shorter riffs than entire symphonies. I have argued that the all-at-onceness of our thoughts and perceptions is at least as inexplicable as what it is like to see red; I think the aural/temporal all-at-onceness makes the point at least as vividly as the visual/spatial all-at-onceness of the curl of smoke in an art nouveau poster.

My Notion of Motion

The temporal aspects of consciousness can be illustrated visually too, of course. Imagine seeing dust motes swirl around in the air in the bright sunlight coming through a window, or someone riding a bicycle past you on a street. When you see these things, you see them in motion. That is, your consciousness is of objects in motion, just as directly and absolutely as your consciousness of a red tomato really is of redness. There may be all sorts of neurobiological and cognitive tricks going on behind the scenes, so to speak, but my actual subjectively experienced moment of consciousness is not instantaneous - it has temporality built in. It is, as Horgan and Tienson (2002) say, temporally thick. The motion of something we see moving is not something we infer or conclude or extrapolate, but something we see, right there in the perception, just as much as shape and color.

Our conception of time is not, like the weird laws of quantum mechanics, some counter-intuitive scientific theory that our mathematics drove us to accept, but that we will never quite feel in our guts. We do feel time in our guts. A given moment of consciousness does not exist as a snapshot taken at a particular instant, or even a series of such snapshots from which we intellectually infer continuous change. As William James (1952) said,

. . . between the mind's own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world. A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of their own succession is added, that must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special elucidation . . .
(emphasis original)

For perception of motion to exist at all, it must be what it is, in its entirety, over a non-zero period of time. Whatever a moment of consciousness is, if you cut a piece off temporally, it just won't be the same moment of consciousness. You can not be conscious of a piece of music, even a short advertising jingle, without having it temporally in your mind's ear as one undivided thing. As Dainton (2000, p. 127) asks, is a strictly durationless auditory experience even possible? Even of something like a single click? There is some spooky way in which consciousness spans time, and is not what it is at a given instant, the way a dumptruck is, but can only be what it is smeared out over time in this way. That is, one can imagine a dumptruck winking into existence for an infinitesimal period of time, then winking out again, and for that instant, it would have been a complete dumptruck. But my percept of Marilyn Monroe breathily singing "Happy birthday, Mister President" simply takes time. It is a single percept, but it would not be what it is if it were just an instantaneous slice of that experience.

James commented on this also and used (but did not coin) the term "the specious present" to describe the illusion that the present instant is an instantaneous point. As he said (James, 1952):

In short, the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were - a rearward - and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the outset a synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to sensible perception its elements are inseparable, although attention looking back may easily decompose the experience, and distinguish its beginning from its end.
(emphasis original)

Given this immediate, undeniable temporality built into our perceptions, the big question is to what extent does this have metaphysical implications? Put another way, can we account for the subjective experience, the phenomenology of the situation, without making extravagant claims about the nature of the universe?

On one hand, it could be the case that the infinitesimal point that we usually think of as being "now" is an abstraction foisted on us as a by-product of calculus, and is not real. There may well actually be no precise point of "present" that divides "past" from "future", and William James's saddleback present is not just a phenomenological or psychological fact, but a literal objective truth of the real world. In this case, our consciousness simply directly perceives a temporally smeared-out reality. Let's call this position the temporal realist position: time really is just smeared out just the way it seems to us, and we simply perceive it directly that way.

On the other hand, it may well be the case that there really is an objective, infinitesimal point of "now", just as science seems to tell us, and our minds somehow buffer information from successive moments. As each moment of consciousness happens, it could include this buffered residue from recently past moments smeared out in the appropriate way. Husserl used the term "retention" to describe this. Moments just past are preserved not in long-term memory, but in a retention that is given whole to consciousness. Let us call this position retention theory.

Computers can do a remarkably good job analyzing waveforms (like sound waves) over time without suggestion of metaphysical strangeness going on. They employ a sort of retention. They map the waveform to data structures, then perform their analysis on the data structures. I'd rather not go back into the computer consciousness debate right now, but my argument against a computer having time consciousness would be similar to my arguments against it having any consciousness. Briefly, I would argue that we have no reason to believe that a computer perceives duration the way we do; rather, it computes itself into a particular state (in the technical sense, in which the computer is seen to implement a Finite State Machine). This state is manifested by a particular (possibly quite long) number. By virtue of being in this state, the computer has a predilection to produce certain outputs that we might interpret as meaning that the computer has "perceived" the waveform, but at any instant during its analysis, the computer was just in a particular state, looking at a tiny crumb of data, and moving to another state as a result.

Some have argued against various construals of retention theory on the basis that it predicts results that we simply do not observe (Thompson 1990, Kelly 2003). In particular, if my seeing the long arc of a pop fly were due to my retention of each successive position of the ball, and superimposing these retentions on my current moment of consciousness, I would see not a ball in motion, but a static arch, perhaps with the longer-ago ball images growing fainter, so that the overall impression would be that of a comet with a parabolic tail. Likewise, if I heard a song according to retention theory, I would hear a cacophony - a simultaneous lash of notes, or at best a chord.

I think that these objections are imaginatively constricted and do not give retention theory a fair hearing. Why should we insist on projecting our presumed time-sense onto our instantaneous space of (visual and aural) perceptions in this way? For the time being, speaking metaphorically, let us think of moments of consciousness as points or shapes in a many-dimensional hyperspace, qualia-space. We already know that, for example, each "pixel" of our visual field has a color that can be mapped onto a three-dimensional color space (hue, saturation, and brightness being the axes). In addition to axes for all of the aspects of all of the other sense modalities, there are many other (possibly infinite) axes. There are many qualia that are not reducible to the five senses: what is it like to think about your father, to get a raise, to want ice cream?

My intention here is not to get into the no-man's land between qualitative consciousness and cognition but to argue that qualia-space is big and has lots of dimensions. Why couldn't there be one more axis, a time axis, in qualia-space? When we see the pop fly, we see it smeared out, but not in such a way that the smearing-out takes place within the instantaneous visual field, but along the axis of an entirely different quale, the time quale. Similarly, the notes of a song are arranged along this axis, imbued with this quale as well, and not all jumbled into an instantaneous aural experience as a chord.

What is it like to experience duration? It just is what it is, and a given conscious experience can have a temporal aspect along with, say visual, aural, and emotional aspects without any of these aspects clashing or having to be mapped to another (as in the hypothesized case of the temporal aspect of the pop fly having to be mapped to the visual field, creating the comet-with-tail effect).

This construal of retention theory does not necessitate anything like a late-night comedy five second delay: each individual moment of consciousness would be experienced as quickly as it could along with a continuum of just-past moments of consciousness, and would then itself also be retained along this temporal axis in qualia-space, to be similarly subsumed by subsequent moments of consciousness. After some time, the longer-ago moments fade out completely.

According to this construal of retention theory, what we perceive as the immediate undeniable passage of time, directly perceived, that is, the time we experience whenever we see anything moving or hear just about anything at all, is, in a sense, an illusion created within the mind. Just as redness is only arbitrarily associated with a certain range of wavelengths of light, this time-quale merely represents actual time, whose real nature is as imponderable as the "real" color of the photons we see as red. Let's call this position the time-quale position.

On the face of it, it seems that the time-quale position is much more easy to swallow than the temporal realist position. Why make a (somewhat outlandish) metaphysical claim when you can make a merely psychological one instead? Certainly adding just one more axis to qualia-space doesn't seem much flakier than the claims I have already made about qualia and their implications for Nature, but positing objectively smeared-out presents, and direct perception of them is an entirely different matter.

To be fair (and I am honestly somewhat undecided on the issue), the temporal realist position is somewhat compelling. I once again appeal to direct subjective experience. The time-quale position entails a distinction between time as perceived (the time-quale) and something else, which I will call scientific, or actual time. Time actually passes in the real world, in scientific time, and throughout time, different sensory impressions are made upon the mind and buffered there as they are experienced. When the buffered information is presented consciously as part of the just-past of a subsequent moment of consciousness, it is strung together and presented as one thing, imbued with the time-quale, or smeared out along the time axis in qualia-space. Each of the seemingly smeared-out moments we have ever experienced, then, has actually been perceived in an instantaneous flash, and the smeared-outness we think we are perceiving is really another quale, like a new color, that actually is only arbitrarily associated with scientific time.

This seems plausible enough at first, but it is a very fine line to hold. That which is mysterious about time, that which seems unlikely to be captured in an instantaneous percept, is not just some collection of facts about scientific time distilled from some formulas, but right there in our immediate temporal percepts. By positing a distinction between scientific time and perceived time, we were trying to let the mind have its temporally smeared-out percepts, but in a way that is metaphysically "safe"; the aspects of time that make it metaphysically inconvenient to give directly to consciousness are to be cordoned off in the realm of scientific time, while the mind plays with its instantaneous time quale.

But now we have to ask ourselves if we can get away with this maneuver. Can we separate our sense of duration from scientific, actual time in this way? How much of what we know about time is already built in, inextricably, to our intuitive sense of duration? When we speak of our sense of a non-zero duration being contained in a zero-length instant of "actual" time, to what extent is this the same as (nonsensically) speaking of a non-zero amount of time being contained in a zero-length amount of time? As David L. Thompson said (1990),

. . . if all our ideas are based on experience, then of course the notion of objective time, as we understand it, (and what else can we speak about?) must be based on experience. The objective notions of scientific time, and any philosophical concepts based on these, must be constituted out of our original experience of internal time.
(emphasis original)

When I consider, for example, my notion of motion, for an arc of a pop fly to be contained in its entirety in a single instant of "actual" time would mean that "actual" time would have very little in common with any conception of time that I understand. The mysterious essence of time, that which makes it inconceivable to compress into a timeless flash, is already there in the subjective experience of time.

As to the reluctance to bite a metaphysical bullet when we might be able to get away with biting a psychological one instead, I have already argued that we have to bite a metaphysical bullet anyway to see anything all-at-once, even a stick lying on the ground. Extending this into the realm of the temporal as well as the spatial and conceptual is not much more outrageous, and may actually clear up some of the mysteries surrounding time that have nothing to do with consciousness.

There is a lot that science does not understand about time, and consequently is silent about. Science generally treats the universe as a four-dimensional block, with the Big Bang at one temporal end. Leaving aside some wrinkles involving relativity, science speaks of points in time, just as it does points in space, and these points can be thought of as three-dimensional cross sections or slices taken out of this block universe. But nowhere in science, certainly not in physics, is there any mention whatsoever of a constantly moving privileged point or timeslice called "the present". What makes now now? Is it just a psychological trick? My point here is that the hard sciences are superb at describing the things they do describe, but there is a great deal of room in the places where they are silent for conjecture about what is really going on. Speculations about real live smeared-out presents, and different presents of different durations for different consciousnesses, do not so much contradict any scientific facts as they try to fill in some of those gaps.

If a thought or percept is temporally thick, what exactly does this mean? I have a strong intuition that my percepts exist through time, that I have direct experiential contact with something that spans a non-zero amount of time. Does this mean I see the future? Not really. That would imply that I have an experience at one point in time of something that takes place at another point in time. What I am suggesting here is that it does not really make sense to speak of any experiences at a point in time. They don't come in points.

I do not know how experiences or consciousnesses are individuated, or if there ever will be any hard and fast criteria for individuating them. But part of the point of calling my qualitative subjective experience qualitative is the claim that however an experience may or may not be individuated as you scale up, you certainly can not subdivide it by scaling down. Experiences tend to fuzz out around the edges, and it may be hard to tell exactly where their outer boundaries are, but I am certain that somewhere within those fuzzy boundaries, an experience must be what it is in its entirety, as a whole, not as a function of any "parts". I have said this before, but what I am now suggesting is that this indivisible, all-at-once whole exists as it does over time, in addition to whatever other sense in which it might exist.