Experience and Time: Transparency and Presence

Abstract

Philosophers frequently comment on the intimate connection there is between something's being present in perceptual experience (call this experiential presence) and that thing's being, or at least appearing to be, temporally present (call this temporal presence). Yet, there is relatively little existing work that goes beyond asserting such a connection and instead examines its specific nature. In this paper, I suggest that we can make progress on the latter by looking at two more specific debates that have hitherto been conducted largely in isolation from each other: one about the nature of conscious experience and one about the nature of time itself. The first concerns the extent to which the temporal properties of experience form an exception to the transparency of experience, meaning that introspection can provide support for one particular view of how experience itself is structured temporally; the second concerns the question as to whether there is something about experience that gives us grounds for thinking that the present is somehow metaphysically special. As I argue, the idea of a connection between experiential presence and temporal presence plays a key background role in each of these debates. Yet it can also, in each of them, be seen to draw one side towards making claims that are supposed to express an important truth but are at the same time, on the face of it, self-contradictory. In each case, resolving what it actually is that these claims are trying to get at turns on recognizing a distinctive feature of perceptual experience, which I refer to as its lack of temporal viewpointedness. Recognising this feature also helps in making sense of what the issues at stake actually are in the intuition of an intimate connection between experiential presence and temporal presence. P hilosophers frequently comment on the intimate connection there is between something's being present in perceptual experience and that thing's being (or at least appearing to be) temporally present. 1 Brian O'Shaughnessy (2000:1. It is a familiar point that, due to the finite speed of light and sound, there is in fact a time-lag before distal events impinge upon our senses, though in the context of ordinary interactions with

Mental imagery: pulling the plug on perceptualism

“…It looks to extend beyond them. 17 The Twofold Phenomenology of the Visual Field has been put to a number of explanatory uses, including: how one is able to see empty space (Richardson, 2010); as what is missing in Bálint's syndrome (French, 2018); and as requiring us to temper claims about transparency for spatial, but not temporal perception (Hoerl, 2018). Now, as mentioned above, defenders of The Dependency Thesis are impressed by the idea that both vision and mental imagery involve a point of view from which scenes are seen/imagined, using this fact to motivate their theory.…”

The Ways of Presentness

“…But that perceptual content is in this respect reflexive, that is, it contains its own perception as part, seems wrong to many people (e.g. Falk, 2003: 221, Balashov, 2005, Callender, 2017, and it is explicitly denied by philosophers believing in the temporal transparency of experience, namely the idea that no temporal property of the perceptual experience itself is manifest in introspection (Connor & Smith, 2019;Hoerl, 2018;Soteriou, 2013). Transparency in the case of temporal (perceptual) presentness is particularly convincing, since unlike the case of perception of spatial locations, there does not seem to be phenomenal distinguishability between the temporal location of the perceiver and the object of perception.…”

“…8) andDeasy (2015). More elaborated "non-classic" forms are discussed inSullivan (2012),Cameron (2015), andDeasy (2015) himself.4 Valberg (1992) and others(Hoerl 2018;O'Shaughnessy 2000) talk of the relation between what is present in perception and what is temporally present. In order to avoid confusion, we will always use the term "present" in the temporal sense and talk about what is "presented" in perception (and in experience more generally).…”

“…Scholars discussing perceptual presentness from the point of view of direct realism arePower (2012),Soteriou (2013), Hoerl (2018. SeeRecanati (2007),Almäng (2012),Kriegel (2015),Connor and Smith (2019) for a discussion from the point of view of representationalism.5 We will use the term "moment" in a broad sense, as standing for entities that can be experienced as having a qualitative status and being virtually instantaneous, such as (perceivable) punctuate events.6 A proposal along these lines may be modelled onVelleman's (2006) view about the flow of time, orBoghossian and Velleman (1989) view about colors.…”

Minima sensibilia: Against the dynamic snapshot model of temporal experience

“…In a discussion of the transparency of perceptual experience, Hoerl similarly claims that it “isn't that both of these locations [the apparent temporal location of the object of perceptual experience and the apparent temporal location of the perceptual experience itself] figure in the phenomenology of experience, and are experienced as being identical, but rather that there is no such thing as the felt temporal location of the experience forming part of the phenomenology of experience. There is just no scope within a description of our experience of temporal properties for a distinction between those experienced properties themselves and a point in time from which they are experienced” (Hoerl, , p. 143). This is to say that we are not in a position to affirm PPC when we are concerned with such short timescales.…”