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This is a non-conscious, multi-mole integrated, simultaneity window that is closely tied to our biological clocks, and which informs our sensory motor systems. The second is the rich conscious experience of succession or passage of time that does not obey the same metric constraints. In this richly detailed study, Monde Maiorblin's empirical research on biological timekeeping mechanisms, and psychological time, are the most important ones. The second is the rich conscious experience of succession or passage of time that does not obey the same metric constraints.
In this very interesting book, I've been doing a number of books on various aspects of time, temporal propositions, and this particular book in the psychology of time, the representation of time, and I'd like to do others. So it's a very interesting, the whole area, philosophical area, talking about time, is very interesting. And your book focuses on a particularly interesting question of how do we represent time. So before we get into the actual body of the book, maybe you could give us a little bit of introductory information about yourself, how you came to philosophy and how you came to this particular topic.
Sure, definitely. So I started out getting really interested in just mental representation in general, how that happens, sort of traditional views of different ways of accounting for the content of mental representation, and then different issues. So as you well know, as you well know, it's very quickly, you get swamped into other problems like what is the phenomenal character of experience, what is the relationship between that and mental representations, and what is the relationship between mental representations, and just representations in general, scientific representations, and so on. So I was always interested in that.
I was also interested in other issues before I started doing philosophy. I studied law and I was interested in the problem of value and human rights and so on, but nothing really interested in me as much as this issue of what is a representation, particularly a mental representation. And of course, it's a very old problem and a very traditional problem in philosophy to account for what what exactly and what precisely happens when we grasp a proposition or we present the world in a certain way. And then I realized that the space and time representation were incredibly fascinating to me.
And I was lucky enough to be close to people who worked on these areas in psychology, people that these experiments on or did still do experiments in perceptual visual attention, sort of mechanisms for timekeeping. And so I was very interested in trying to understand the philosophical aspects of what they were doing and sort of isolate because as you were mentioning, there are many problems related to time. They're all very interesting. One of them is what is the nature of time in physics, for example, or what is the nature of time in general.
Another one is what is the propositional account? What kind of propositional account of tense can we give in language? That's another very interesting issue. And then there's this problem that I wanted to isolate, which is what I ended up doing in the book, which is how can any creature that represents time do that?
And what are the mechanisms on the underlying representation? Are those independent from language or from the language capacity? And is there a way to isolate the world representation from all the representations, for example, the representation of causality or the representation of agency or the self? So that's how I ended up working on this.
So I've characterized the exponandum of your book as how do we represent time? So maybe you want to clarify that a little bit further in terms of its relation to some of the other debates. The more famous maybe debates on the A theory versus the B theory or presentism versus eternalism. Yes, absolutely.
And that's a very good question because the way I started the project was I wanted to engage a bit more with the debate and metaphysics. I quickly realized that it was just too ambitious because the debate and metaphysics, the particular is the A theory that says that there is an objective. There's something objectively unique about the present moment. And so there's always an objectively sensible answer to the question, one moment is present.
So there's a theory that says the defense that you see, and then there's the alternative theory that says that's false. There's no objective present and there's no unique, there's sort of no objective passage of time. And then what they say, this is how I got interested in these debates from the representational side of things. What the B theory says is that the passage of time is an illusion.
And of course, illusions are the realm, I mean, they fall within the domain of analysis of psychology. And it's interesting that within these metaphysical debate, all of a sudden this psychological claim gets made and becomes central. So I wanted to understand even if it's an illusion, I mean, regardless of what happens in terms of the physical reality of time, we need an account of even if it's a loser, even if it's not entirely carving nature or it's joints, as people say, there must be an explanation of how we represent time. And that's how these fits a little bit within that debate.
Although, of course, I don't end up saying anything particular about metaphysics, but that's how it fits within the broader debate. So your account is consistent with us being all of our beliefs about timing completely false, but that's just not relevant to your concerns. Well, I think the so one aspect of the problem is that you need to have certain constraints to represent time. And those constraints cannot just be merely subjective, dispositional constraints.
And I tried to explain in the book that there must be some objective basis for time representation. But you're right that it is compatible with what the B theory says, because the B theory wants truth makers for propositions about simultaneity or succession, for example. And they believe that there are such relations of succession and simultaneity, they just deny that there is this objective passage of time. And all I need to give an account of the objective basis for the representation of time are those relations.
I mean, I do end up saying something that is a bit controversial, which is that these relations of succession and simultaneity are not something we really experience when we have the phenomenology of time. But a lot of these information processing happens unconsciously. And there's a ton of time keepers that are not even representational. So but to answer your question, that's how I think it's got my why I say in the book is in principle compatible with the two major views on the nature of time, the A theory and the B theory.
I think that that doesn't really, I mean, so for example, if all propositions regarding the passage of time are false, that is a bit of orthogonal to what I doing in the book. Okay. So at the very end, I saw a nice, you write that what needs to successfully and reliably represent time are clocks and simultaneity judgments. And that was a nice, very simple and precise way of summing up basically the work of the book.
And so you begin with a discussion of clocks of time keepers. And then you proceed into questions of the nature of mental representation. And then you proceed at the end to this to what you call your two phase model of the president of how we represent the president. So I think let's start with the clocks.
You know, a lot of very interesting detail about the different two different kinds of clocks, two different times of time keepers, the various advantages and disadvantages. And then of course, some that you call semi hybrid time keepers. So maybe you could say a bit about these different kinds of time keepers and then our biological, right, the circadian clock and then the stopwatch. Yeah, definitely.
So I think this is what I found most fascinating about the psychological literature is that the depth and detail of the studies that psychologists and biologists have done is just it's actually breathtaking. When I started reading, it's just a beautiful research. And it's really rich. So in that section of the book, what I try to explain is that the sort of anecdotal evidence that animals were great time keepers and particular bees and insects and how and then sort of the mere fact that animals navigates in implies that they have rich special important presentation needed a lot of evidential basis to really become a precise statement concerning time representation and so the biological mechanism to keep track of time.
But the debate of what exactly constrains a clock or why is a clock is actually a debate that started a little bit more in physics. And so I talk a lot about Reichenbach because he in his book, The Philosophy of Space and Time explains in a lot of detail and we've got great clarity that a clock is really just a process. That's it has to be a physical process and just like you need as Einstein realized, rigid rods to measure space and then certain assumptions about energy and forces and so on, units of time to measure time and those units of time are not ideas, they're not concepts, they are aspects of processes, aspects of natural processes. So because it's this discussion and why the daily cycle of day and night, the rotation of the earth on its own axis is actually a great clock because it has a constant rate, it repeats itself, it's stable, it's reliable and more importantly you can divide it into units and those units have the metric aspects that you need to guarantee reliable measurements of time namely intervals can be compared and they are invariant with these comparisons.
They are the basis for example for additive properties of these measurements so twice an interval will always be twice an interval because the units are precise and the rate of the passage of time in the clock is skipped constant. So the constraints that you need to guarantee precise time measurement are exactly the same constraints that you need to measure time physically with physical clocks. So those constraints were found in some biological systems and then actually the circadian clock which is this clock that Reichenbach talks about as a very reliable clock that guarantees this metric constraints on intervals and other constraints that clocks must satisfy. This clock was found throughout biological organisms, the circadian clock, it was found obviously in human beings and it has a big impact on our sense of time but one interesting question is what makes a clock, so once you have a reliable clock and they have different advantages for example when you represent time with a circadian clock or a cyclical clock you lose track of certain things.
So you lose that track for example of when something started and when something ends or you need to impose a representation on the clock to do that whereas if you have an interval clock let's say an hourglass you flip the hourglass you know exactly which was the beginning moment and which is the last moment right it's empty the bottom is empty and also the top of the clock is empty and that indicates the end of the interval. So these advantages and these advantages when people started designing clocks for example the atomic clock that is used in physics they use the cycles of an atom to mark the pace of a pacemaker and so it is an incredibly precise clock. So psychologists are asking why exactly happens when we measure time, what are the clocks that we have and as it turns out we have two clocks, one cyclical which is the circadian clock and it's very precise it emulates the rotation of the Earth and its own axis and we have another clock which works a little bit more like an hourglass and the experiments show that the representations actually have, so these are not merely mechanical clocks we don't merely biologically respond to these clocks although of course they are part of our biology we actually have mental representations of time that interface with states and with other magnitudes like rate or density and these representations are based on these other neural processes that underlie the circadian clock and the stopwatch. So it took a lot of ingenuity and time and research to figure out which animals represents time, why that those representations are really representations they're not merely biological processes and so for example why although plants have e-sukaining clock in an obvious way they cannot represent time, why insects have e-sukaining clock and besides using the e-sukaining clock for many biological processes like gene expression they also use that clock to navigate which is a deeply representational activity.
So I don't know if these answers are a little bit of a question it was a very rich question and very exciting to me because that's the part of the book where I really realized sort of the gigantic amount of research that had to be done to corroborate these capacities to represent time and in particular the existence of these two clocks. Well I mean it was a surprise to me that you talked about the stopwatch, I mean we've all heard about the circadian clock, you know the superheismatic nucleus, but I had not heard about the stopwatch and I take it we do not have a, there's no particular structure that is the stopwatch right it's just a process, some sort of interval process right? Yes exactly so as you said the superheismatic nucleus has been confirmed to be the locus of the circadian clock and it is pretty controversial that it exists and you're right that the stopwatch is a little bit more controversial because the models that psychologists have proposed are not to be a big naive so they literally think that the process that the brain instantiates when the brain measures intervals so but what is not controversial is that the brain does two things, it can represent time in a sort of for longer periods, even even periods of hours or several hours in terms of circadian clock representation so insects can do this, but then for shorter intervals birds but also humans have the capacity to emulate intervals and this is from seconds to minutes in a very precise way and they can abstract and ask these intervals clearly having representations and these are, this is important because the resolution of the clock is finely tuned to relevant intervals so for example replenishing of flower nectar for birds is one of those intervals, predicting when the light is going to turn green at a stop is one of those intervals in the case of humans when they drive and so for these type of process the representation of time is not cyclical rather it is interval like or linear but in for very short intervals and so the models that the famous model proposed by by Gibbon was called the pacemaker and Warren Mac also studied a lot of the neural correlates of this pacemaker and it is believed that it's deeply related to attention there's a cortical area that is supposed to be involved in this process but you're right that it is probably in it's misleading to call it a stopwatch because the image that comes to mind is that something is sticking inside the brain as if an hourglass was getting filled but something like that something analogous to that happens in the brain that's the idea that is very unlike the circadian clock and it is important for a lot of behaviors it's very important for simultaneity judgments for example across simultaneity and it's also very important for actions that the motor system has to frame in a linear way rather than in a longer sort of temporal frame where the circadian clock could be used okay so I mean I'm tempted to to ask more about about the clocks but I would like to turn to the nature of temporal representation so that we can get to a lot of the material on on simultaneity judgments because that too is very was fascinating so both time keepers uh produce representations of time um and somewhat in different ways right one is periodic and one is interval and they both produce them these representations uh for use by the sensory motor system exactly okay so um one thing I guess I wasn't uh wasn't clear about is whether they contribute to a single representation or whether they contribute distinct representations um and uh and then furthermore just what sort of notion of representation are you using to explain the contents of each of these representations or the the one combination representation uh yes so this is a very very interesting topic one of the most one of the main motivations I had to work on this issue the representation of time is that time representation seems to be really really unique um because it doesn't involve the typical symbolic representations so one thing that I that I uh uh uh say in the book is that representations of time are approximate their analog if you know in a sort of philosophical sense of analog which means that they are dense and you can always be more precise ever more precise or uh or or change the scale and and lose precision to gain generality and so on so um in that sense both uh clocks produce the same type of representation in the sense that they are analog approximate uh they are not exclusively symbolic if they are interfaced with symbolic representations uh that is not what what underlies for example navigation so that when underlies navigation is this more approximate analog way of representing uh uh time uh but there's there's a sense in which the representations differ really uh importantly and the way for example psychology is like Alistair's though explaining it is that the the mathematical way of understanding the structure of the representation of the circadian clock is in terms of the angles of a circle so uh that's one of the explanations of how insects navigate they use uh the solar femurs function and the angle of the sun to compute locations so they literally translate readings of the cycle of the circadian clock into spatial temporal locations that they use for some complex navigation and so this is clearly a representational process right and one of the question is why is this not just a mirror response to to the to light for example or the cycle of the sun and the answer i gave in the book is that it cannot be just that kind of uh sort of biological base reaction because computing the solar ephemeris function based on the circadian clock really requires several representations that need to be cognitively integrated uh in terms of a common coast it obviously is not a prepositional language that the insect is using or the insect is not really uh deducing conclusions from premises rather what the insect is doing um according to this research is mapping different representations one of them is a circadian clock reading with positions that the insect needs to locate itself in a map and so this process uses several representations it cognitively integrates these representations and that means that the insect is capable of representing time in terms of its circadian clock uh unlike that representation the representation of the produced by the stopwatch for example the representation of time produced by the stopwatch is not really model i mean if you want to express it mathematically you really don't need this uh angle based representation of the for example the the degrees of a circle but rather the structure of the line in mathematics and interestingly canton shopping power and other philosophers has had this view that our the origin of uh the mathematical continuum the the real numbers is a representation of time right and so this this very much goes along with that idea so the idea is the interval clock produces a representation of time that is linear uh it is uh it has this um in various correlation uh with respect to uh the specificity of the measurement so if it's a very short interval clock it is very precise with respect to that short interval but then it loses uh resolution as the intervals increase but the idea is there is no limit with respect to how long or or small the interval is in principle right i mean there are biological limits but in terms of the representation uh the the time is represented approximately and in terms of segments of a line and so you can express that in terms of numbers in the real line and of course that doesn't mean that we literally represent intervals in terms of real numbers what it means is that that one way of expressing the structure of the representation produced by the stopwatch just like the circle and the mathematical relations among the angles of a circle express the structure of the representation of the representations of time produced by the circadian clock so what we've been using the term representation you know obviously quite a bit um so maybe you can say something about um the notion of representation you know what mental representation i suppose um that you that you defend in the book it's i mean so it's more or less i take it a standard sort of teal informational account um so maybe we could say word about um uh you know the nature of these representations in the mental representational um since you know how they get their content and how they how we know they misrepresent yes i mean that's a that's a great question it's a tricky question because uh the teleological notion of a representation so that that is for example milikens idea that the uh representation uh anything that has uh uh any process that has a structure in which ends are interrelated with means in the behavior of the creature uh shows that that there's some representational content that you can express in terms of the theological function namely there is a goal that the creature wants to achieve and a condition for the creature to succeed is some sort of content that the creature is representing that there's also to be a tricky notion because plants do this right so uh and i uh plants have uh a function that they fulfill for example they they have some some form of uh several procedures by means of which they equilibrate themselves and control water absorption uh solar energy absorption and so on these are all goals that the plant uh meets by uh satisfying certain constraints they're all objective environmental constraints depending on the position of the sun and the position of the plant and so on and it seems to use the clock right it seems plants is heavily used as they're getting called to do these things so you just you look at sunflower the sunflower turns and follows the sun keeps track of the sun and so so then the question is well that conception of representation seems to prove too much or seems to be inadequate but that because now we're attributing representation to plants so i i have a way of avoiding that problem but do you want to go ahead because i i'm go ahead go ahead yeah so i think that is definitely a problem because then you're getting into further problems like when you see the tree the trunk of a tree it seems to be keeping track of the years right with the tree rings but obviously the tree is not representing them in a very very obviously way so what i say is that they're not even these these processes that the plants are going through or they're performing are clearly not even representational they are encoding information but the in order to and actually militants is a little bit about this in order for a that process a theological process to count has a representational process the information is to be used in a way so it is a user or an agent that reads the information and then that becomes a representation so tree trunks are not representations of the tree uses they're representations that humans use to keep track of years and so that has to happen with the clocks just merely responding to environmental features automatically and costly is not enough to give you a representational relation you need a way to use that information so for example insects use that information to navigate and to compute information for some complex navigation birds use information from the their stopwatch to compute rates of nectar refilling in flowers and so that's how you get rid of this objection that that it's too weak the theological representation account is too weak to to explain time cloud representation now there's a further problem that for example Tyler Burch talks about that even if you have representational processes if they are too isolated or too subpersonal they may not count as representations because for example they may be too close to the to the proximal stimuli right so you're talking about the retina are the encodings that happen in the individual cortex representations well they are if you if you if you think that anything that maps information in a systematic way and tracks information from the environment is a representation then those mapping accounts are a presentation so a way of avoiding that problem which is different from the automatic response to the environment problem is to have this further constraint that I say the representations of the clock definitely satisfy which is that the representative the user of the representation or the mental cognitive agent in this case insects or humans or birds or whatever need to use this representation at the personal level not just a very isolated level of information processing but in a way that deeply informs their behavior right and also in a way in which environmental particulars are represented as such so so intervals of time are represented as interval intervals of time and not only that they can be attributed to particular events right and research shows that insects birds and then and other creatures can do this okay so once we have sort of a notion of you know timekeeping and then representation you sort of pull it all together in a another you know very interesting discussion of simultaneity judgments across a number of different sets modalities and then you know how these come together in a multimodal sensory or simultaneity window and so you you end up with what you call a two-phase model of the present and I like to kind of you know go through the different parts of that because you know each of the parts was was pretty was was interesting and I think maybe we can start with with some of the the the modality specific simultaneity windows or that you know that we have the judgments we have about you know when we've just you know seen one thing as opposed to seeing two things or heard to one thing as opposed to her two things yes definitely so this is another area of research all of which is based on human subjects obviously I mean this is this is a research on on on send specific simultaneity windows and what I mean that the really interesting so there's two aspects of this research that that makes it particularly fascinating so going back to the constraints on on precise time measurements these are just physical constraints right that physicists use all the time or the time of certain events you need the um constancy the unit of time constraints that units must be all the same to every level time measurement the rate at which time passes needs to be constant because then that's a that's a requirement for the units to be the same length but then I further constrain this how do you know that given to different events whether or not they happen at the same time right that's a deeply different question from just keeping track of time based on on units of time because this mesh this question requires you to have a way of knowing whether or not to distant events in space are happening at the same time so you know where you kind of need either two clocks or some sort of judgment to determine that and what is interesting about what writing about this is that that judgment just like the the the decision that something is the right unit for time is a bit arbitrary right so it just needs to satisfy the right constraints it needs to give you precise measurements they can never be more precise you can always need more precise and so on that means there's no definitive uh standards but uh you need these to have uh obviously uh time measurements right so and animals and humans need this as well so you need in order to comprehend uh what someone is saying you need to know uh what uh sounds or something more things with the uh words that are coming from someone else to play tennis you need to know when about hitting and whether or not about it's hitting at the same time that you're moving your arm and so on and so on so this is a different problem and the brain cannot use and this is why it's super interesting the brain cannot just use the clocks to solve this problem right because the clocks are just ticking and they are very useful but they cannot by themselves tell the brain whether two events are happening at the same time now what complicates things is that the events that are happening outside the brain are coming into the brain through different sense signals and these signals are coming at different speeds so light is coming at a very very fast speed and sound is not coming at such fast fast speed and the proprioceptive system has different thresholds and so on so the trick that the brain uh evolves to solve this problem is it has different thresholds for simultaneity so the threshold for simultaneity you know vision is very very small compared to that of vision maybe that's because of the speeds of light and sound and so in the auditory modality very quickly you know uh that two events are not simultaneous because the simultaneity window is very very small i think it's through milliseconds and that changes in vision and that changes in the haptic modality and so this creates a problem right because if two events could be simultaneous in the auditory modality but not simultaneous in the visual modality and that's because the windows are different the window for simultaneity in vision is larger than the window for simultaneity in addition then how does the brain compensate for these discrepancies right and so so that's where i started proposing that there the there has to be a cross-model window for sensory simultaneity that sort of the moodens out these discrepancies otherwise it would be very difficult to operate right you would you would have some of the judgments from addition telling you this is simultaneous but what you're seeing is not simultaneous and we would operate in pretty schizophrenic ways uh time-wise right so so the the the bigger window the cross-model window is not only bigger in the sense that it is moves and sounds discrepancies between audition and vision and the haptic modality it's also crucial to have a a sort of overall judgment of what is simultaneous periods and this happens intentionally uh that's not what i said in the book we don't really quite experience this it's a decision that is made for us in a way that is similar to syntax processing so if you think about syntax processing you're not really aware of uh how is it that you're parsing the information uh that you're in code syntactically when you speak a language of course there are aspects of language that you're conscious of you're aware of the meaning of a word or the imagery that a word uh evokes but you're not really conscious of the syntax uh processing that underlies language uh the language capacity you're not even conscious of the articulatory code that depends on that syntax processing so something like that happens with this amount of any judgment and so that's the first component this cross-model window is the first component of this proposal that i that i i'm meeting the book of the two-phase model of the present so let me stop you and see if you have questions about this first example at this point we're talking about the what you call the sensorial present um yeah um so maybe just to uh just to step back a little bit and then and then roll forward um so you know philosophic philosophers will we'll we'll discuss you know the specious present you know the the briefest moments that we can experience you know succession or change and they'll ask about the relationship between this specious present you know that what we're experiencing and the indexical now right or something or let's talk about the unity of consciousness and you know the presence you know what's what is now present to me in my consciousness um and and so on your view this is this is kind of confused because it's in a sense it's it's um it's mushing together two distinct uh presence that we actually uh represent or that we that we um i don't want to use the word experience because one of them is not at least not always experienced it i suppose it can be but it isn't typically um just as we don't typically experience or we're not typically conscious of of processing syntax but but you can interrupt things and then suddenly make that you know make that yeah but um so it's not it's not necessarily unconscious um but for the most part it's it is um so so you've got this sensorial presence that we've sort of been talking about and then you've got this the phenomenal present and there are traditional you know discussions of the specious present have sort of mush these things together and you're trying to to distinguish them so so maybe we can you know to go back to where we were with the specious present oh sorry the um the sensorial presence as a representation of this multi-sensory integration window you know simultaneity window um okay that's the one the one sense right uh there's a representation there and that's for sensory motor coordination exactly um and then there's the other one which is what you call the phenomenal uh present so you could say so the question I wanted before we get to the phenomenal present first I wanted to ask we were talking about the the the uh this integrated multi- multimodal window that sort of encompasses all the different simultaneity symbols of the distinct um synodalities and one of the things that you said there that I thought was really interesting was it's not that it's not just that this sensorial present this this multimodal integration window somehow integrates all the different senses despite their different simultaneity windows but also that it there's an ordering that goes on that gets imposed on these you know because you've got different simultaneities um and that of course means that things are going to be presented in a different different order and so maybe you could say something about what happens you know to get all these simultaneity windows to integrate and get an order and then also why the mechanism that orders them is itself you know is sort of not a temporal mechanism yeah so um uh the the reason why I think it's it's it's bad and that's you're right that I say in the book that it's uh there's a bit of ambiguity in the literature when they talk about the sensorial the species present and I think uh we should uh that ambiguity should be avoided because the species present uh involves these two radically different uh cognitive processes one of them involves conscious experience the other one involves uh sensory model representation for coordination and and this a very clear way to see that is that the constraints that any measurement of time needs to satisfy to count as a good time measurement are all satisfied by the sensorial present right so it satisfies the units of time constraint and the uniformity of rate constraint by having good clocks the circadian clock and the stopwatch what is a good clock is a clock that satisfies those constraints right so it also satisfies the the simultaneity constraint by having good mechanisms to detect these uh the the synchrony of of events uh by means of these windows that the brain has right um and so a good way to think of these windows is as a hierarchy of smaller windows that get integrated into the sensorial present but then once you have the judgment that's two events or simultaneous you need the clocks to know whether once you know that something is simultaneous that is also simultaneous with another event or if time has passed between that event and uh another event so you need not only simultaneous judgments but also a way to represent duration right in in most debates on the species present this is never even mentioned but it is absolutely fundamental to navigate and i think what happens uh or at least this is why i think this is the sensorial present this part of is is is is it is a component of this model that i called a two-phase model but it's also good to think of it as part of of the measurements that we need to navigate when recording any time so it gives the crucial information that two events are simultaneous but then in order for you to re-operating time you not only need these simultaneity judgments but as you were saying you need to order them in terms of duration and the only reliable way of doing that is by interfacing the clock with the i'm sorry the simultaneity judgments from the cross-model window to the clock such that the moments the intervals of time somehow correlate with the simultaneity chunks of millisett let's let's say they're um uh smaller than 250 milliseconds those chunks in which everything is simultaneous right anything anything below that window the brain is going to register simultaneous those chunks are going to correlate with the intervals of time that uh the clocks are going to measure so so that imposes an ordering automatically in the in the sensory model system because you have a good block that it's it's uh getting information from this uh systematic uh uh computation of simultaneity and so that ordering as it's also unordering that of course without or being aware of it it doesn't really involve conscious experiences what it really involves is representations from the clocks and they need to be representations as we mentioned before not just biological process or even cortical mappings and they also need to overlap with simultaneity judgments and so that that gets all done uh sort of uh unconsciously uh with uh the systems to compute simultaneity and also with the clocks to give this very rich uh i mean as i say in the book it's a very rich space of possible uh actions it gives you a configuration space of action because you know how to react to stimuli uh how to embed information temporarily and so on and so i think that needs to be clearly distinguished because when people talk about this species present they say oh it's the smallest the one idea is the smallest uh amount of time in which something is present but it's not point-like right it's not it's not it's not the Planck scale and it's not a millisecond so that's species right because it's not it's not point-like well in that sense of species this sensorial present is species because it's not it's not point-like it's not it's not instantaneous it's a few milliseconds right but in a different sense it's not a species present that that many philosophers has have in mind because they they then start talking about experiences so then they say this species present is the shortest amount of time in which you experience a musical phrase well that's clearly not related to these much more precise simultaneity judgments the sensory motor system makes right and so i think that ambiguity is best kept sort of uh cleared by i mean it's much better if we disambiguate this term because then we can't know what we're talking about when we say something is present right right so so um i mean it's kind of like when people talk about the b theory in metaphysics and then introduce the notion of illusion right that that we started with illusion is is a is a mental notion and so you're sort of often running into a different direction and the same thing here with experience it seems like uh when people start talk if if philosophers are talking about the present um in terms of a moment you know a temporal motion of some sort and then say that we experience um for you of course that's that's already bringing in something else that isn't part of what uh what explains the the the present as uh as we judge you know sort of subconsciously exactly and if i could add something uh i mean you're completely right uh and something that is important is for the brain to satisfy the the all these constraints sort of the simultaneity judgment constraint and the other the passage of time constraining terms of the rate and the units of time constraining the brain doesn't need experiences to do this right and if you think about it it would be us if the brain needed experiences to do this because what the brain needs is reliable timekeepers representations based on those timekeepers and judgments in order to determine whether or not events happen simultaneously and that really has nothing to do with with what the subject is experiencing it has to do with satisfying the subjective constraint so it makes sense that the brain has these mechanisms operating in a very very uh more or like way sort of like the way we process symptoms because otherwise it would be difficult to satisfy them if we if we had to have awareness in the mix uh so i think it's not it's not that that that um awareness is irrelevant of course awareness of time is a very very deeply problematic issue but it is irrelevant to satisfy these constraints well why we should talk about the phenomenal present because that that is where experience is is critical so maybe you can say word about about that and and uh and then how these two are are related to each other yeah so so i mean the probably i mean the term two phase model uh i mean i came up with that term for lack of a better term but the idea is that this i'm alternating windows clearly are not operating on experiences right the the domain or the range of application of these windows is is really just it's mostly signals from the sense modalities uh it cannot be the experience of smelling a flower or the experience of listening to the thob and symphony so why is that right that that's where the original uh motivation uh to talk about this vicious present came from and at least if you read William James but of course these examples of listening to a musical phrase or the experience of uh having anxiety and so on these are typically uh rich examples that Husserl used many other phenomenologies like Marlopen T so what is that i think we don't have a good theory of what that is but what i say is that it has to be something radically different from the sensorial present that's why i call it a two phase model because if if a simultaneity information is used at all in the generation of this phenomenal present it has to be used in a radically different way sort of sort of the way a phase transition happens right so so the transition that water goes from solids to liquids is that kind of transition there's a deep modification of of information and the information is no longer structured in terms of simultaneity judgment and duration it is rather information that integrates in a very very unique way sort of amalgamates different experiences into these very very thick presence moments right and so that's exactly the term for example Nick Humphrey uses to talk about this he calls it the thick time of experience and the what the reason why it's thick is because simultaneity and duration are completely relevant for this type of integration what matters for this type of integration and i think uh team bane and dane jalmers called these called this uh sub-sumption is the relation responsible for this type of integration is that in the phenomenal present all experiences are integrated into a an overall experience which people also call a total experience and in this total experience there is the sense that all your experience the other experiences are present to you at once but of course it's present this notion of present to you is not really the notion of our simultaneous or simultaneous of course because this notion of presence which is a lot more elusive than the notion of simultaneity involves the presence of a society plus the presence of the melody of a song plus the presence of your proprioceptive experience of how your body is located and so on and so on and so on so that's why i think that one thing i say is we don't have a good account of that and we but it's clearly different one thing we can say safely about that kind of integration is that it is not really the type of integration that happens for simultaneity and that's what i call the other sort of present so um so just to just to pursue this um a little bit further um so the phenomenon but you do you do say that the phenomenal present involves the experience of succession or of a passage of time and and not just not just a succession of appearances but actually an experience of succession of time and i thought maybe you could say something about that and you you also say uh you know you do draw some important distinctions i think between these two types of representations of the present in terms of the information the sources i think of information that they that they integrate and that the metric constraint one the phenomenal present does not have the metric constraint so maybe it could say a little bit about that yes definitely um i would like to talk with a metric constraint because it's a bit a bit less tricky so so if you think about the metric constraints as a constraints on any time measurement including time measurements in physics those are satisfied by the tutorial present right the simultaneously those plus product plot a clock now if you think about how your current experience is integrated right your experience of listening to me uh feeling what you're feeling uh the expectations that you're having the thoughts that you're having and so on the imagery associated with those thoughts etc etc those don't seem to depend on those metric constraints right so they don't seem to the integration of those experiences even though you feel they're passing in time they don't seem to be fully uh integrated based on whether there's simultaneous or not or whether they are uh happening at the same time strictly speaking in terms of which window is operating and so on so it's not only that that the integration seems to be metrically unconstrained or at least not metrically not reduced to the metric constraints of typical time measurements but you're right also one thing that is important to emphasize that i say at the end of the book is that the sources of information for phenomenal integration are a lot larger than than the but the sensorial present does in terms of detecting signals right so you have that kind of integration in dreams so when you're dreaming your experiences are being integrated phenomenally you're having visual experiences you're experiencing color you're experiencing emotions but your math your sensory model system is turned off right you're just lying in best oh uh so that kind of that's what i mean by metrically unconstrained they seem to be different in terms of the constraints that this process is going to bring in experiences are uh trying to satisfy so i think that that is a bit clearer than the issue which a lot more tricky but i'm glad you you brought it up of the difference between a succession of experiences now notice that we're talking about experiences right there's not just a succession of events or a succession of signals that the British is uh detecting but a succession of experiences the difference between that the succession of experiences and the experience of succession right i think that is a very very tricky issue i say very sort of tentative things about that uh what i think is is safe to say is that it is true that when you talk about how we experience the passage of time not just measure the passage of time with the glocks but experience it that that experience cannot be captures in terms of many many experiences having at different times and ordering terms of simultaneous relations right sort of as in the way a movie frames of pictures creating illusion that something is moving right i think the experience of passage because of certain experiences like the experience of anxiety or the experience of or emotions in general cannot be just reduced to to successions right there's something unique about the experience of succession uh and that's where i say that that that that's sort of aspect of our experience of the passage of time favors certain views that get uh called uh in in literature on on temporal consciousness as the extensional model and the extensional model with one aspect of the extensional model there's several uh different things about it but one aspect of it is that is this claim that um uh experiencing the passage of time cannot be reduced to vignettes of successive experiences um we've been talking about time for for over an hour so i i think actually we we are running out of time um so let me just uh there's there's a lot more to discuss but um unfortunately um uh this this is an interval and the interval is coming to its its natural conclusion um and the natural conclusion here is just um what is your do you have a follow-up project on this or what are you working on next is there something completely different are you going to follow this up with with other research related yes i actually am very interested in this issue that you mentioned that fascinating that v-series uh part of of their claim or of actually not part of very central claim they make is that the passage of time is an illusion uh so i'm very interested in in in trying to uh really try to get a grip on that claim what exactly do they mean and how to account for that illusion and sort of uh keep exploring this issue of uh what kind of relation do you need to to uh integrate experiences uh and and how it's independent from from the metric of the sensorial present so i'm working now on on on the sort of uh on that kind of uh one project in both the illusion of passage uh i'm also very interested in just conscious awareness in general and these uh type of relation that integrates experiences into a phenomenal whole that uh i think it's not only gaining momentum uh as an important philosophical topic but i was i call it are also very interested in this and i i am very interested in in each too well great so well thank you very much and thank you kara this was great we're talking to you we're talking to you okay bye bye you've been listening to an interview with Carlos Montemayor about his new book minding time a philosophical and theoretical approach to the psychology of time just out from braille i'm kara figore this is new books and philosophy i hope you enjoyed the podcast and thank you for listening