Distrusting the present

Jakob Hohwy (Monash University)

Distrusting the present

Bryan Paton, Colin Palmer, Jakob Hohwy, Cognition & Philosophy Lab, Monash University.
The specious present refers to the temporal phenomenology of conscious experience. It is described as an extended, moving window of experience. For example, when listening to music we don't experience one note at a time, instead there seems to be simultaneous conscious presence of a few past notes, the present note and even anticipation of future notes. Explaining this aspect of conscious experience is a key task for neuroscience of consciousness. We argue that hierarchical perceptual inference provides a promising underlying mechanism for the specious present. This account combines well with a similar but non-hierarchical model, proposed by Rick Grush. We demonstrate that the resulting notion of 'distrusting the present' explains the experienced flow of time, and we show how it throws light on individual differences in healthy and mentally ill individuals.