Time & Consciousness: Two Faces of One Mystery? Part 1

Time & Experience: Twins of the Eternal Now? (by Gregory M. Nixon): Abstract: In what follows, I suggest that, against most theories of time, there really is an actual present, a now, but that such an eternal moment cannot be found before or after time. It may even be semantically incoherent to say that such an eternal present exists since “it” is changeless and formless (presumably a dynamic chaos without location or duration) yet with creative potential. Such a field of near-infinite potential energy could have had no beginning and will have no end, yet within it stirs the desire to experience that brings forth singularities, like the one that exploded into the Big Bang (experiencing itself through relative and relational spacetime). From the perspective of the eternal now of near-infinite possibilities (if such a sentence can be semantically parsed at all), there is only the timeless creative present, so the Big Bang did not happen some 13 billion years ago. Inasmuch as there is neither time past nor time future nor any time at all at the null point of forever, we must understand the Big Bang (and all other events) as taking place right here and now. In terms of the eternal now, the beginning is happening now and we just appeared (and are always just appearing) to witness it. The rest is all conscious construction; time and experience are so entangled, they need each other to exist. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/75

Why Time Flies When You're Having Fun (by William A. Adams)

Abstract: This paper distinguishes scientific and psychological time, and suggests how cycles of mentality define units of psychological time. This explanation explains the elasticity of psychological time and gives a broad account of the relationship between consciousness (mental activity) and time. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/73

Liberation and its Constraints: A Philosophical Analysis of Key Issues in Psychiatry (by Steven Bindeman)

Abstract: There can be no question that we are living in a post-Husserlian and post-Freudian world. Their modernist dream, consistent with Enlightenment ideals, was to create a perfectible science of consciousness that would ultimately have the power to liberate people from their confused and conflicted selves. But we can’t seem to get past the distortions that surround us. We are incessantly exposed to all sorts of images containing signifiers that we are unable to ignore. If in consequence we tend to internalize and become consumed by an increasingly large number of signified impressions that are uncontrollable and insatiable, then the limits of any science of consciousness become increasingly clear, and the insights made possible by hermeneutical interpretation must be included in our ongoing efforts to liberate ourselves from them. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/77

Now (by Gordon Globus)

Abstract: The Now is not of time but of Being, dis-closure. Time is continually stretched (Heidegger’s temporal ekstases) whereas Now is a match “between-two.” The now is unfolded anew in the dual mode match of each segmented Moment. There is no universal creative Now, as Nixon (2010) suggests, but unique fragmented Nows, monadological Nows, discreet dis-closures of Being within scattered monads of sufficient complexity. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/78

‘Landscapes’ of Mentality, Consciousness and Time (by Chris Nunn)

Abstract: This paper describes ‘mentality’ in terms of the contents of dynamic state spaces, then goes on to explore how consciousness-associated features of these contents, termed ‘ruling attractors’, could ‘map’ onto neural states. A fractal mapping, its links with memory mediated by the protein CaMKll, is pictured; it’s a view that, with minor differences of emphasis, turns out to have a lot in common with Stuart Hameroff’s ‘conscious pilot’ as far as the neural (though not quantum computational) picture is concerned. Finally, it is proposed that consciousness itself may be a local field, supervenient on fractally mapped ‘ruling attractors’and due to time-related symmetry breaking. Lines of evidence that may prove relevant to these ideas are indicated. I thus argue that consciousness can be described as a succession of ‘ruling attractors’ in the brain; it is based on fractal patterns of calcium waves, interacting with EEG fields and recorded by changes in protein (CaMKll) activation, while it may turn out to be a modulated ‘temporal field’. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/79