Human Experience of Time

The nature of temporal experience is typically explained in one of a small number of ways, most are versions of either retentionalism or extensionalism. After describing these, I make a distinction between two kinds of temporal character that could structure temporal experience: A-ish contents are those that present events as structured in past/present/future terms, and B-ish contents are those that present events as structured in earlier-than/later-than/simultaneous-with relations. There are a few exceptions, but most of the literature ignores this distinction, and silently assumes temporal experience is A-ish. I then argue that temporal character is not scale invariant, but rather that temporal experience is A-ish at larger scales (a few hundred milliseconds and above), and B-ish at smaller scales. I then point out that this scale non-invariance opens the possibility of hybrid views. I clarify (or modify, depending on how you want to frame it) my own view (Grush 2005, 2007) as a hybrid view, according to which temporal experience is B-ish at small scales – and at this scale my trajectory estimation model (TEM, a version of retentionalism) applies – but A-ish at larger scales, and at the larger scale my TEM does not apply.  I then motivate this hybrid position by first defending it against arguments that have tried to show that the TEM is untenable. Since the hybrid view has TEM as its small-scale component, it must address this objection. I then put pressure on the main alternative account, extentionalism, by showing that its proponents have not adequately dealt with the problem of temporal illusions. The result is a new theory (perhaps characterizable as a refined version of my prior theory) motivated by i) explaining its virtues, ii) showing that objections to it can be met, and iii) showing that objections to its main competitors have not been met.

Français [English abstract follows].

« Sur l’horloge de l’histoire », note Adam Rayski, « les aiguilles avançaient plus vite pour les Juifs que pour les autres populations de l’Europe occupée. Le temps des autres n’était pas exactement le nôtre… » [Adam Rayski Nos illusions perdues, Paris, Balland, 1985, p. 91]. Cependant, les Juifs ne peuvent pas faire individuellement l’expérience du temps à un rythme constant. L’expérience du temps n’est en effet jamais uniforme. Concernant celle des Juifs de France pendant l’Occupation, elle n’a guère été vraiment interrogée, tout comme la manière dont leur temporalité est structurée durant ces années. À travers l’exemple rémois, notre propos entend démontrer l’importance de ces questions dans la compréhension de la condition des Juifs de France au cours de cette période. Il mobilise dans ce but de nombreux témoignages, ainsi que des concepts et notions de psychologie en plus des outils de l’historien. Au terme de notre démonstration d’inspiration phénoménologique, une temporalité en majeure partie différente dès 1942 de celle des non-Juifs se dessine, composite, saccadée. Elle traduit une persécution qui s’étend au final jusqu’à l’architecture soutenant la vie des Juifs de France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

* Romain Dupré, « The Lived Time of the Jews of France during the Second World War : the example of Reims ».

« On the clock of history », says Adam Rayski, « the hands advanced faster for Jews than for the other people of Europe that was under occupation. The time of the others was not exactly like ours… » [Adam Rayski Nos illusions perdues, Paris, Balland, 1985, p. 91]. Meanwhile, the Jews cannot individually experience time at a constant rate. Their experience of time is indeed never uniform. For the Jews of France during the Occupation, Time was hardly really questioned, like how their temporality was structured over the years. Using the example of Reims, our purpose intends to show the importance of these issues in the understanding of the status of the Jews of France during this period. For this purpose, he mobilises many testimonies and psychology concepts, in addition to the tools of the historian. At the term of our phenomenologically-inspired demonstration, Temporality contours between Jews and non-Jews show the emergence of major differences from 1942 onwards; Jews’ time being more interrupted, less constant. It reflects a persecution which in  the end extends to the architecture supporting the life of the Jews of France during the Second World War.

Introduction
François Hartog coined the term “regimes of historicity” in a critical note entitled “Marshall
Sahlins et l´antropologie de l´histoire” (1983) on Marshall Sahlins’s lecture that was published in
the American Anthropological Journal. This notion was born from the encounter between history
and anthropology. Hartog and Gérard Lenclud defined it for the first time in 1993 as “the type of
relation that every society has with its past, the way that it is treated by it and how she treats it to
use it and build this thing that we call history” and subsequently added that the regime of
historicity “refers to the modality of a self-consciousness of a human community” (Hartog and
Lenclud 1993: 26, my translation). In 2003, Hartog developed this concept in his key book on this
topic Régimes d´historicité: Présentisme et experiences du temps, and he defined it as “the ways
in which these universal categories or forms we call ‘the past’, ‘the present’, and ‘the future’ are
articulated,” namely, the ways that societies in different times and in different spaces organize
the past, present, and future.

Biographical article (21 pages) about Schloegl, a Cistercian (Heiligenkreuz Abbey) Old Testament scholar put on the index of forbidden books in 1922 because of his German Bible translation. He was a professor at University of Vienna and the novice master for the racial theorist and antisemite Lanz "von Liebenfels" who soon left the order and the priesthood.

The goal of this paper is to introduce Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences' thematic issue on disordered temporalities. The authors begin by discussing the main reason for the neglect of temporal experience in present-day psychiatric nosologies, mainly, its reduction to clock time. Methodological challenges facing research on temporal experience include addressing the felt sense of time, its structure, and its pre-reflective aspects in the life-world setting. In the second part, the paper covers the contributions to the thematic issue concerning temporal experience in anxiety, depression , mania, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, and in recovery from psychosis. The authors argue in favor of integrative and cross-disciplinary approaches. In conclusion, they present time as a significant aspect of human suffering.

Abstract I examine several aspects of the experience of time in depression and in the experience of different emotions. Both phenomenological and experimental studies show that depressed subjects have a slowed experience of time flow and tend to overestimate time spans. In comparison to patients in control conditions, depressed patients tend to be preoccupied with past events, and less focused on present and future events.

The goal of this paper is to introduce Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences’ thematic issue on disordered temporalities. The authors begin by discussing the main reason for the neglect of temporal experience in present-day psychiatric nosologies, mainly, its reduction to clock time. Methodological challenges facing research on temporal experience include addressing the felt sense of time, its structure, and its pre-reflective aspects in the life-world setting. In the second part, the paper covers the contributions to the thematic issue concerning temporal experience in anxiety, depression, mania, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, and in recovery from psychosis. The authors argue in favor of integrative and cross-disciplinary approaches. In conclusion, they present time as a significant aspect of human suffering.

Action of a hallucinogenic substance, psilocybin, on internal time representation was investigated in two double-blind, placebo-controlled studies: Experiment 1 with 12 subjects and graded doses, and Experiment 2 with 9 subjects and a very low dose. The task consisted in repeated reproductions of time intervals in the range from 1.5 to 5 s. The effects were assessed by parameter κ of the 'dual klepsydra' model of internal time representation, fitted to individual response data and intra-individually normalized with respect to initial values. The estimatesκ were in the same order of magnitude as in earlier studies. In both experiments, κ was significantly increased by psilocybin at 90 min from the drug intake, indicating a higher loss rate of the internal duration representation. These findings are tentatively linked to qualitative alterations of subjective time in altered states of consciousness.

The goal of this paper is to introduce Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences' thematic issue on disordered temporalities. The authors begin by discussing the main reason for the neglect of temporal experience in present-day psychiatric nosologies, mainly, its reduction to clock time. Methodological challenges facing research on temporal experience include addressing the felt sense of time, its structure, and its pre-reflective aspects in the life-world setting. In the second part, the paper covers the contributions to the thematic issue concerning temporal experience in anxiety, depression, mania, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, and in recovery from psychosis. The authors argue in favor of integrative and cross-disciplinary approaches. In conclusion, they present time as a significant aspect of human suffering.

The goal of this paper is to introduce Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences' thematic issue on disordered temporalities. The authors begin by discussing the main reason for the neglect of temporal experience in present-day psychiatric nosologies, mainly, its reduction to clock time. Methodological challenges facing research on temporal experience include addressing the felt sense of time, its structure, and its pre-reflective aspects in the life-world setting. In the second part, the paper covers the contributions to the thematic issue concerning temporal experience in anxiety, depression, mania, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, and in recovery from psychosis. The authors argue in favor of integrative and cross-disciplinary approaches. In conclusion, they present time as a significant aspect of human suffering.

This paper argues that applying a mental files framework for singular thought to thoughts about specific times could produce an account of tensed thought with significant advantages over competing theories. After describing the framework (1), I argue for the conceivability of treating particular times as res of singular thoughts (2), and the possibility that humans open ‘object files’ for them during perception (3). Then I discuss the possible make-up and function of a NOW indexical mental file (4). The last section argues that, if our ‘now’ thoughts can be coherently analysed as thinking of a time under the NOW mental file, one would have a plausible explanation of the following issues: how tensed thought can refer to extended temporal intervals of various length; why reference to times is not destroyed by thought delays; and how a ‘now’ thought results in timely actions and, sometimes, relief.

Action of a hallucinogenic substance, psilocybin, on internal time representation was investigated in two double-blind, placebo-controlled studies: Experiment 1 with 12 subjects and graded doses, and Experiment 2 with 9 subjects and a very low dose. The task consisted in repeated reproductions of time intervals in the range from 1.5 to 5 s. The effects were assessed by parameter κ of the 'dual klepsydra' model of internal time representation, fitted to individual response data and intra-individually normalized with respect to initial values. The estimatesκ were in the same order of magnitude as in earlier studies. In both experiments, κ was significantly increased by psilocybin at 90 min from the drug intake, indicating a higher loss rate of the internal duration representation. These findings are tentatively linked to qualitative alterations of subjective time in altered states of consciousness.

The goal of this paper is to introduce Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences’ thematic issue on disordered temporalities. The authors begin by discussing the main reason for the neglect of temporal experience in present-day psychiatric nosologies, mainly, its reduction to clock time. Methodological challenges facing research on temporal experience include addressing the felt sense of time, its structure, and its pre-reflective aspects in the life-world setting. In the second part, the paper covers the contributions to the thematic issue concerning temporal experience in anxiety, depression, mania, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, and in recovery from psychosis. The authors argue in favor of integrative and cross-disciplinary approaches. In conclusion, they present time as a significant aspect of human suffering.

Résumé

Cette thèse s’intéresse à l’évolution du rapport à l’histoire et de la conscience historique dans la société canadienne de la première moitié du XIXe siècle et propose une analyse métahistorique de deux principaux corpus de sources : le matériel pédagogique employé dans les collèges classiques, ainsi que les ouvrages historiographiques et politiques marquants pour l’élite canadienne, des réflexions du politicien Denis-Benjamin Viger au Rapport Durham et aux écrits de William Smith, Michel Bibaud et de François-Xavier Garneau.
En analysant ces sources à la lumière d’un outillage théorique issu de l’historiographie de la représentation du temps, je propose une relecture de la constitution d’une conscience historique nationale au Canada français. Je démontre que la « nationalisation » de l’histoire est un phénomène graduel qui s’est échelonné sur l’ensemble des trois premiers quarts du XIXe siècle. Si l’histoire nationale a mis du temps à s’imposer, c’est parce que la conscience historique du monde intellectuel canadien au tournant du XIXe siècle était modelée sur les principes philosophiques universalistes de l’humanisme et du christianisme. Loin d’être spécifique aux Canadiens, cette mutation de la représentation de l’histoire s’insère dans un large mouvement occidental qui a été abondamment observé et commenté par l’historiographie. Enchevêtrées dans une histoire commune avec la « disciplinarisation » de l’histoire, la catégorisation des peuples et leur projection dans le temps n’est ni une évidence ni une nécessité, mais plutôt le produit d’une évolution culturelle partagée à travers le monde atlantique.

Abstract

In this thesis, I discuss the evolution of the experience of time and historical consciousness in Canadian society during the first half of the nineteenth century and propose a metahistorical analysis of two main bodies of documents : the educational material used in classical colleges, and a number of historiographical and political publications that were significant for the Canadian intellectual elite, from Denis-Benjamin Viger’s reflections to the Durham Report and to the writings of William Smith, Michel Bibaud and François-Xavier Garneau.

By analyzing these historical documents using conceptual tools inspired by the historiography of representations of time, I propose a reinterpretation of the advent of a national historical consciousness in French Canada. I demonstrate that the “nationalization” of the past was a gradual phenomenon that spanned the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. If national history was not prominent around 1800, it is because Canadian intellectuals interpreted the past on the basis of the theological principles of Christianity and the universalist philosophy of intellectual humanism. Far from being specific to Canadians, this evolution in historical representation has been observed and commented upon by a rich historiography elsewhere in the Western world. Bound up with the disciplinarization of history as a historical phenomenon, the categorization of the Nation and its projection into the past was neither obvious nor necessary, but rather the product of a cultural evolution shared throughout the Atlantic World.