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Continuity and the Flow of Time: A Cognitive Science Perspective

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Philosophy and Psychology of Time

Part of the book series: Studies in Brain and Mind ((SIBM,volume 9))

Abstract

Modern tools and methods of cognitive science, such as brain imaging or computational modeling, can provide new insights for age-old philosophical questions regarding the nature of temporal experience. This chapter aims to provide an overview of functional consciousness and time perception in brains and minds (Sect. 8.2), and to describe a computational cognitive architecture partially implementing these phenomena (Sects. 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5), and its comparison with data from human behavioral experiments (Sect. 8.6).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Confirmed by Christof Koch in personal communication with one of the authors.

  2. 2.

    Masking involves the elimination of the visibility of one briefly presented stimulus by the presentation of a second brief stimulus (the “mask”).

  3. 3.

    Binocular rivalry involves presentation of different visual stimuli to the left and right eyes of subjects. In this paradigm, conscious perception alternates between the two stimuli—see also Fig. 8.1.

  4. 4.

    More specifically, LIDA often uses directed graphs composed of nodes and links to represent items (nodes) and relationships between them (links).

  5. 5.

    A codelet is a small, single purpose, independently running piece of code, corresponding to a process in Baars’ Global Workspace Theory. Structure building codelets build structures of nodes and links.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Tamas Madl

  2. Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Vienna, Austria

    Tamas Madl

  3. Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

    Stan Franklin & Javier Snaider

  4. Department of Computing and Technology, Cameron University, Lawton, OK, USA

    Usef Faghihi

Authors
  1. Tamas Madl
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  2. Stan Franklin
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  4. Usef Faghihi
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Correspondence to Tamas Madl .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Bruno Mölder

  2. Department of Behavioral Sciences and Philosophy, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Valtteri Arstila

  3. Department of Communication and Psychology, University of Aalborg, Aalborg, Denmark

    Peter Øhrstrøm

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Madl, T., Franklin, S., Snaider, J., Faghihi, U. (2016). Continuity and the Flow of Time: A Cognitive Science Perspective. In: Mölder, B., Arstila, V., Øhrstrøm, P. (eds) Philosophy and Psychology of Time. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22195-3_8

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