Is Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel Inextricably Linked to the Self? (original) (raw)
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The complex act of projecting oneself into the future
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2012
Research on future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) is highly active yet somewhat unruly. I believe this is due, in large part, to the complexity of both the tasks used to test FMTT and the concepts involved. Extraordinary care is a necessity when grappling with such complex and perplexing metaphysical constructs as self and time and their co-instantiation in memory. In this review, I first discuss the relation between future mental time travel and types of memory (episodic and semantic). I then examine the nature of both the types of self-knowledge assumed to be projected into the future and the types of temporalities that constitute projective temporal experience. Finally, I argue that a person lacking episodic memory should nonetheless be able to imagine a personal future by virtue of (1) the fact that semantic, as well as episodic, memory can be self-referential, (2) autonoetic awareness is not a prerequisite for FMTT, and (3) semantic memory does, in fact, enable certain forms of personally oriented FMTT.
Toward a Typology of Mental Time Travel
In this article I set out to unify and in some measure extend some of the current models of mental time travel (MTT). In the past, models have focused either purely on the mental scenes evoked through MTT (Suddendorf & Corballis 1997, 2007; Suddendorf et al. 2009) or on the conceptual mechanisms enabling MTT (Stocker 2012, 2013). I claim that these models are largely compatible and suggest how they can be combined in a ‘two-layered’ model consisting of a ‘constructional’ and a ‘conceptual’ level. I suggest that not all mental scenes can be attributed to MTT and that the difference between MTT scenes and other scenes is MTT scenes’ function of future planning. I also suggest that function is a useful criterion for distinguishing three different types of MTT, which I name ‘deictic’, ‘sequential’, and ‘extrinsic’ each making its own contribution to a phenomenon so important to what makes us human.
The Transcendental Character of Temporality and the Buddhist Contribution to Time-consciousness
Enriching the parallel between transcendental phenomenology and enactivism, I briefly discuss the compatibility of the Buddhist perspective with Gallagher’s contribution to time-consciousness. Grounded in his meditative practice and heartfelt engagement with Buddhist philosophy, Varela de-constructed representationalism and its underpinning metaphysical dualism, building up the generative concept of enaction. His approach has been deeply inspired by Madhyamika Buddhism, which describes time-consciousness as that double illusion that frames phenomena as either becoming or permanent.
Mental Time Travel and Attention (2017)
Australasian Philosophical Review, 2017
Episodic memory is the ability to revisit events in one's personal past, to relive them as if one travelled back in mental time. It has widely been assumed that such an ability imposes a metaphysical requirement on selves. Buddhist philosophers, however, deny the requirement and therefore seek to provide accounts of episodic memory that are metaphysically parsimonious. The idea that the memory perspective is a centred field of experience whose phenomenal constituents are simulacra of an earlier field of experience, yet attended to (organised, arranged) in a way that presents them as happening again, is, I suggest, a better one than that the memory perspective consists in taking as object-aspect the subject-aspect of the earlier experience, or the idea that it consists in labelling a representation of the earlier experience with an I-tag.
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 2015
Following the seminal work of Ingvar (1985. "Memory for the future": An essay on the temporal organization of conscious awareness. Human Neurobiology, 4, 127-136), Suddendorf (1994. The discovery of the fourth dimension: Mental time travel and human evolution. Master's thesis. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand), and Tulving (1985. Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology/PsychologieCanadienne, 26, 1-12), exploration of the ability to anticipate and prepare for future contingencies that cannot be known with certainty has grown into a thriving research enterprise. A fundamental tenet of this line of inquiry is that future-oriented mental time travel, in most of its presentations, is underwritten by a property or an extension of episodic recollection. However, a careful conceptual analysis of exactly how episodic memory functions in this capacity has yet to be undertaken. In this paper I conduct such an analysis. Based on conceptual, phenomenological, and ...
This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for mental projection of the self over time. Major elements of pioneering ways of investigating mental time are theoretically unified by using Talmyan concept structuring as a basic theoretical framework.The theoretical strategy is to use linguistic expressions about time (cross-related events) as an entree to conceptual structures about time that seem deeper than language itself. It is proposed that analyzing linguistic temporal structures with this strategy helps to uncover an imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time--the time machine in our mind. This imagistic machine lets mental time unfold as a spatialized extension and the self (also called ego or observer) must be within this spatialized temporal extension and look along it as a means to travel through it. Specific empirical predictions as well as implications for animal cognition research are discussed.
What role does the temporal dimension have for our understanding of the mind, and how should cognitive research approach the task of implementing the flow of time into our models of the mind? The following monograph will discuss the recently developed predictive framework of the mind in relation to phenomenological philosophy, centering on the opportunity for intertheoretical cooperation in disclosing the connection of the mind and temporality. Asserting that phenomenological philosophy is compatible with an action-oriented version of the predictive mind, the thesis argues for a rejection internalistic versions based on structures from a Husserlian analysis of inner time-consciousness. Within a relatively few years, the predictive framework of the mind has branched into several distinct interpretations (Friston 2010) (Hohwy 2013) (Clark 2016) (Linson et al. 2018) all founded within the same basic framework but with diverging views on topics such as embodiment, embeddedness and enactivity. While some authors maintain that the predictive framework of the mind is fundamentally internalistic, other versions contend that the predictive framework indicates a strongly embodied, embedded and enactive mind. This thesis follows a discussion between diverging accounts from the predictive framework of the mind, arguing for an action-oriented version broadly compatible with embodiment, embeddedness and enactivism, and with a model of perception from phenomenological philosophy. Finally, the thesis presents an analysis from classical phenomenology as part of an argument for why internalistic accounts of the predictive mind may fall short of a full account of the mind.
Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2024
Based on a creative use of the phenomenological method, we argue that a close examination of the temporality of objects reveals the future as genuinely open. Without aiming to decide the matter of phenomenological realism, we suggest that this method can be used to investigate the mode of being of objects in their own temporality. By bracketing the anticipatory structure of experience, one can get a sense of objects' temporality as independent of consciousness. This contribution adds a further voice to the current Realism versus Idealism debates, but it does so without taking sides. The starting point is neither an analysis of pure consciousness, nor attempts to describe objects in-themselves, but the idea that things can be phenomenologically grasped through the difference between their temporality and our own. By being methodically "open to the future," one can become aware of the sui generis temporality of objects as different from the temporality shaped by our anticipation.