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.
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