Dan Lloyd peering through a cascade of suspended pocket watches
Topic

Mind the Time!

What makes human consciousness distinct from everything else, including AI, is our awareness of time. We directly confront the now, but with an omnipresent awareness of the immediate past, and anticipation of the immediate future.

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Book

Subjective Time
MIT Press, 2014  ·  Co-edited with Valtteri Arstila  ·  MIT Press ↗
The flagship here is a collaboration with the Finnish philosopher (and friend) Valtteri Arstila. The book collects articles by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, all swirling about the central mystery: We directly confront the now, but with an omnipresent awareness of the immediate past, and anticipation of the immediate future. (This, I conjecture, is disrupted by psychiatric illnesses, drugs, and other forces.)
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Papers

2024
Dynamic Snapshots and Artificial Temporality
Do AI systems have any purchase on time — on the flow of experience from past through present to anticipated future? An exploration of what temporal structure in neural networks can and cannot simulate.
In True Colors, Time After Time, Painosalama Oy, 2024 PDF ↗
2012
Time After Time: Temporality in the Dynamic Brain
On the layered structure of conscious time — the specious present, retention, and protention — and what neuroimaging can reveal about how the brain sustains this temporal arc.
In Being in Time, Edelman, Fekete & Zach, eds. John Benjamins, 2012, pp. 1–21 PDF ↗
2012
Neural Correlates of Temporality: Default Mode Variability and Temporal Awareness
An investigation of how spontaneous fluctuations in default mode network activity relate to the brain's construction of temporal awareness — linking resting-state variability to the felt passage of time.
Consciousness and Cognition, 21:695–703, 2012 doi ↗
2012
Schizophrenia and Functional Imaging: Shame of the City
An examination of what neuroimaging studies of schizophrenia reveal — and conceal — about the disorder's disruption of temporal and cognitive integration in the brain.
2012 PDF ↗
2007
Civil Schizophrenia
On schizophrenia as a disorder of temporal self-awareness — and what that implies for how we understand both the illness and the structure of normal conscious experience.
2007 PDF ↗
2002
Functional MRI and the Study of Human Consciousness
A secondary analysis of four fMRI datasets applying phenomenological concepts — intentionality, superposition, and temporality — to the study of consciousness. Multivariate methods reveal neural analogues of temporal structure across 27 subjects.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(6):818–831, 2002 PDF ↗
2014
The Disunity of Time
A closing reflection on the experimental psychology of time perception — arguing that subjective time is not one thing but many, built from dissociable mechanisms and embedded in the fabric of perception and action.
With Valtteri Arstila, in Subjective Time, MIT Press, 2014
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Time at the Intersections

Time ×
Mind
This page is the Mind × Time intersection — temporal awareness as the defining feature of human consciousness, explored through neuroscience and philosophy.
→ mind
Time ×
Mind × Music
Music unfolds in time — and so does consciousness. How the brain tracks musical structure mirrors how it tracks experience itself.
→ mind-music
Time ×
Shakespeare
A Timely Poet — Shakespeare's sonnets as a sustained philosophical reckoning with time, decay, and the possibility of escape.
→ time-shakespeare
Time ×
AI
What AI lacks, above all, may be temporal experience — the felt passage from past through present to future that defines consciousness.
→ ai
See also Mind × Music Shakespeare × Time AI Words