Abstract
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.
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Notes
The literature on temporal experience lacks an accepted taxonomy of positions (both in how theories are divided and their labels). My use of ‘extensionalism’ and ‘atomism’ comes from Lee (2014a) and maps onto Hoerl’s distinction between molecularism and atomism (Hoerl 2009), and Lee’s earlier distinction between experiential process views and atomism (Lee 2014b).
Other salient discussions that begin by posing a similar puzzle include (Boroditsky 2011; Dainton 2014a). Despite minor differences, the main puzzlement remains the same—how is it that experience can represent time if experience is due to the causal relation between the senses and the current state of the world.
While Kelly himself doesn’t give an argument for the snapshot model, an argument for the view can be found in the early modern empiricists and their distinction between simple and complex experiences (Hume 2000; Locke 1689; Reid 1855). Consider an experience that presents a non-zero duration. With the experience of any duration we can, at least conceivably, imagine what it would be like to experience just the beginning (or later) half of the duration. Therefore, the experience of any non-zero duration is a complex experience. The simple experiences that constitute all experience, must therefore be snapshot-like in that they cannot present any duration.
Someone might try to salvage the snapshot model by arguing that some process stitches these snapshots together into complex temporal experiences. Therefore, the temporal contents of the complex temporal experience would be more than a sum of the temporal contents of the snapshots. This only shifts the same question to how that stitching process acquires its content.
Notably Chuard (2011), Gallistel (1996) and Reid (1855), have chosen to bite the bullet and deny that we have temporal experience by relying on restricted understandings of experience. For instance, according to Gallistel, experiences are only brought about by domain specific sensory transducers, of which there are none for time, therefore there cannot be temporal experience. For Reid, experiences cannot involve cognition or memory, both of which are involved in temporal representation, so therefore there cannot be temporal experience. Despite their claims, however, we can still speak of what it is like to represent the temporal structure of the world around us in a way that is different than pure recollection or thinking. If we take experience in this broad sense of the term, then we are not beholden to any architectural restrictions on what counts as genuinely experiential, and it is in this broad sense of experience that our discussion will continue.
Extensionalists needn’t be committed to experiences being divided into arbitrarily short temporal parts. Rather, they are committed to there being some such temporal parts.
This is similar to the inferential approach to introspection proposed by some transparency theorists (e.g. Dretske 1994). Note that the argument here does not depend on experience in general being transparent, only that temporal experiences are transparent.
This example comes from Grush (2006).
Set aside the other problems that resemblance theories face.
In this case, it’s not the mere possession of temporal properties that is doing the causal work. Rather, it’s some time-dependent property of the system that is doing the causal work.
For instance (Phillips 2014b) argues that apparent cases of temporal dilations, in which we perceive events as having much longer durations than they in fact do, are actually cases in which other stimuli are contracted in duration.
Another way of putting the point is that if the process that gives rise to the experience of the tone lasting 80 ms can be divided into temporal parts, and these temporal parts are themselves semantically interpretable such that they individually represent the contained experiences of shorter durations and stand in the same temporal relations to one another as the durations represented by those parts, then the mirroring constraint is satisfied.
The general idea is that there is a trade-off between resolution and noise. If a system that is capable of discriminating durations as short as 30 ms, then the worry is that whatever representational process is employed at that scale cannot be scaled up without significant amounts of noise—more than what would be expected from the Weber fraction.
While Wittman and van Wassenhove also appeal to dissociations in their argument, they primarily focus on pharmacological and mechanical interventions.
People can typically tolerate small temporal asynchronies in stimuli that are nevertheless perceived as simultaneous—e.g. when the audio and visual tracks of a movie are out of step (Dixon and Spitz 1980). The perception of simultaneity in people with schizophrenia allows for greater asynchrony (Martin et al. 2013), while people on the autism disorder spectrum allow for less asynchrony (Stevenson et al. 2014).
See (Ivry and Schlerf 2008) for general discussion of intrinsic models.
For example, Lebedev et al. (2008) see timing as the result of ramping activity in pre-motor areas. However, the same conclusions would be reached by looking at their model.
Thank you for an anonymous referee at this journal for pushing this objection.
A notable example is found in Grush (2006).
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Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited from comments from a number of people. I want to give special thanks to Murat Aydede, Carl Craver, Emma Esmaili, Kathy Fazekas, Eric Margolis, Christopher Mole, Evan Thompson, Hannah Trees, Lawrence Ward, and Kenneth Williford for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Viera, G.A. The fragmentary model of temporal experience and the mirroring constraint. Philos Stud 176, 21–44 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-1004-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-1004-4