Tuesday, 9 September 2003
Brain Time and Phenomenological Time
Rick Grush
University of California, San Diego
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning

Abstract: The existence of puzzling phenomenological phenomena, such as perceptual retrodiction (in which what subjects perceive at t depends on things that occur after t) and intention-governed perceptual prediction, underscore the need for a theoretical grasp of the temporal information processing structure that underlies subjective phenomenology. I will discuss a number of phenomena, from the so-called 'specious present' to temporal illusions that are currently the subject of much cognitive neuroscientific research, and present a theory of what it is that the brain does at the sub-personal level (in brief, a Kalman filter control architecture generalized to a smoother-filter-predictor), that can account for some features of why we experience temporal features of things the way we do at the personal level. The account has direct relevance for a number of philosophical issues concerning the temporality of experience as well as cognitive neuroscientific investigations of perception.