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Time And Consciousness: From Metaphysics To Psychology – Analysis

Philosophy begins as thought comes to recognize the peculiar relation in which it stands to time - one through which man fundamentally distinguishes himself from the animal. ~ Sebastian RödlTime remains one of the most mysterious conundrums that continues to trouble and intrigue philosophers and scientists to this day, even to the extent that there is no articulated consensus on the precise nature of the problem itself. Much like consciousness, time—particularly the passage and direction of time—appears to be common-sensical and self-evident, yet it is difficult to pin down where exactly the trouble lies: i.e., whether it is merely an explanatory/conceptual issue (pertaining to our knowledge) or an ontological/metaphysical one (pertaining to objective reality) or if these are even separate issues at all. It seems that both the problems–of time and consciousness–are intimately related to each other in a way that remains rather obscured and mystified in contemporary philosophical discourses. Let us take a look at a simplified version of both the problems, examine how they are interrelated and explore some recent trends in philosophy that gestures toward a framework that locates the core of both mysteries. What are the problems of consciousness and time? The hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996) is the problem of reconciling subjective, qualitative experiences with the mechanistic and quantifiable properties of brain/neuronal states. The hard problem is an inevitable roadblock in the metaphysics of physicalism which assumes that fundamental reality is composed of ‘unconscious’ or ‘inanimate’ particles, fields and forces interacting with each other, from which qualitative properties of sense-perception emerges in the brain. To this day, there is no satisfactory resolution to this problem and every tentative proposal to redress this issue runs into an impasse. This has given rise to three broad metaphysical camps (within which there are different variations): (1) Physicalism – posits that fundamental reality is physical and quantifiable and therefore mind (brain) is nothing but a highly complex and organized machine that generates an ‘illusion’ or ‘projection’ of consciousness and qualia (Daniel Dennett’s version of eliminative materialism or Keith Frankish’s illusionism are exemplary cases); (2) Dualism – assumes that mental and physical aspects are both fundamental but distinctive properties of every object/system (Chalmers’ property dualism or E.J. Lowe’s non-cartesian dualism, for example) or are either substantially different entities or parallel aspects that interact with each other (e.g.- Cartesian substance dualism and Leibnizian psychophysical parallelism, respectively) and, (3) Idealism – which assumes that reality is fundamentally mental or mind-like and that the physical, mechanistic regularities are mere appearances that instantiates the properties of a larger mind (Bernado Kastrup’s analytic idealism, for example). There are proposals like emergentism, panpsychism and others that are situated somewhere in between the three major metaphysical camps and implicitly or explicitly carry commitments towards either of those three. The problem of time refers to a cluster of different issues arising from certain fundamental assumptions in mathematics and unification-problems in physics (Carlip, 2023; Thébault, 2019). One assumption central to the mathematical field of geometric topology, for example, is that reality can be described in spatial terms at its base, with objects existing within an invariant, symmetric order that preserves continuity of certain properties. Spatial concepts (like "left-right," "up-down”, etc.) are symmetric and can be mirrored, showing no intrinsic directionality, while time is directional and inherently asymmetric (since “before” and “after” are not interchangeable). Whether this asymmetric, unidirectional flow (the arrow) of time is fundamental to reality ( Lee Smolin, Tim Maudlin and a few others propose such a view today) or is merely a limited view of the observers–that is, the passage of time is ultimately not real although the temporal coordinates are useful constructs ( held by contemporary physicists like Sean Carrol, Julian Barbour, Carlo Rovelli, etc.) – is a central mystery in the metaphysics and foundations of physics. Furthermore, the concept of ‘now’ or the ‘present’ is highly disputed, some holding that it is merely indexical (or dependent on the observer’s frame of reference, after Einstein’s special theory of relativity), while others claiming that quantum mechanics and causal non-locality (a strong contender after Bell’s theorem and PBR theorem) calls for a vindication of some kind of Newtonian ‘absolute simultaneity’ (Albert & Galchen, 2013) at the fundamental level. So, there are two distinct problems here that concern the question of time: one is regarding its fundamentality (whether the passage of time is fundamental to reality or it is merely apparent and emergent from spatial relations or from something more fundamental than space-time itself). A second problem is regarding simultaneity or whether there can exist a privileged ‘present’ moment throughout the universe. The three metaphysical camps pertaining to time are : Eternalism – where past, future and present are all equally real, existing within a block-like universe; Presentism – where only the present is real, while past and future are ultimately not; and Possibilism – where the past and present are real, but the future is not (simplified taxonomy borrowed from Carroll, 2015). This is closely related to the work of 20th century metaphysician McTaggart who gave a much more detailed account of different theories pertaining to time (his famous A-B-C series) which are discussed extensively in philosophy even today, but we shall keep things simple here. To sum up, Physics does not tell us clearly whether time is directed and passes in an objective sense, nor does it tell us with accuracy if there is a privileged ‘present’ moment, in any fundamental sense. One crucial point of intersection between the hard problem of consciousness and the problem of time is the seemingly privileged or situated role of the observer, which stands as an obstacle to understanding the structure of either. Brand Blanshard famously said that “If science could get rid of consciousness, it would have disposed of the only stumbling block to its universal application” (Blanchard, 1980). In his book “The View from Nowhere”, Thomas Nagel says regarding our knowledge of the objective world that “we can't free it entirely of infection with a particular human view” (Nagel, 1986). This situatedness of human subjectivity also arises from the unavoidably temporal nature of thought itself, which thinks within a point in time (from their respective ‘present’) while trying to think behind and beyond it. That is, despite the temporal situatedness of human thought, it has the unique capacity to think about the past and future, albeit only from their located, experienced-present. A tendency to treat conscious observation, the source of all our insights, as central to metaphysics (the study of what is/what exists), also might lead one in the direction of presentism. Lee Smolin, one of the pioneers of loop quantum gravity, says “my conviction that what is real is real in the present moment is related to my conviction that qualia are real” (Smolin, 2013). Consciousness and Time as problems of / for psychology The hard problem of consciousness has been approached from various angles across the fields of neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, etc. Some recent proposals suggest that the ontological problem of consciousness can be recast as a psychological problem : that is, to show that the hard problem of consciousness which ‘appears’ as an ontological conundrum (how and whether subjective states and physical states are ontologically distinct) is the consequence of a knowledge intuition problem, ‘rooted in human psychology’ and its implicit biases and intuitions towards ‘dualism’ and ‘essentialism’ (Berent, 2023). This type of approach aims to address what Chalmers calls the meta-problem of consciousness, which is why there seems to be a hard problem at all. While it seems trivially true that ‘the hard problem of consciousness arises, in part, from human psychology’ (ibid), the problem still remains insofar as a “fully adequate solution to the meta-problem should be able to explain not only why these intuitions are widely shared, if they are, but also why they are not universal, if indeed they are not.” (Chalmers, 1996). Also, why certain ‘intuitive biases’ are to be characterized as biases at all while others are not, demands further explanation– as to why the proposition that mental states are irreducible attributes of brain states is an intuitive bias but reductionism and supervenience of mental events upon physical events, are not.  In such arguments, the metaphysics of physicalism is presupposed in order to dispute a challenge internal to it, which is begging the question and yet, this is precisely how science proceeds – by reconstituting metaphysical problems in the form of specific conceptual and interpretational issues while implicitly relying on a specific metaphysical standpoint (physicalism in this case). In a Gödelian sense, no axiomatic system or a priori truth-claim can be proven consistent without reference to its own premises, thus revealing a hermeneutic loop at the core of logic reasoning when it comes to metaphysical discussions. Such problems might drive one back to the issue of psychologism that Frege tried to overthrow with his construction of a formula-language for ‘pure thought’. In analytic philosophy, there is a new trend in this psychologistic direction where philosophers like Irad Kimhi argue, against the tradition of Fregean logic, that there are no gaps between ontological, logical and psychological propositions (Kimhi, 2018). Such an audacious claim takes recourse to the age-old Parmenidean puzzle (how can one think that which is not) and argues that ontological propositions are nothing but psychological modes of thinking which is the essence of logic insofar as logic captures the form of human thought as such and not how thought ought to be (his dictum ‘the personal is the logical’ echoes this spirit). Concerning the question of time (tense), Kimhi even claims that it is a mistake ‘to look for an understanding of time in physics or the philosophy of nature’ (ibid), implying that the problem of time is a matter of the thinking subject who investigates the ‘present’ (that which is, which is ontology or metaphysics as conceived by Aristotle) which cannot be approached “sideways on”.  From a Parmenidean standpoint, past and future are both ‘nothing’ (that which does not exist anymore or as yet) and to think ‘nothing’ is impossible except through that which ‘is’ (present). However, Kimhi’s account explicitly presupposes a metaphysics of presentism (the view that what is real is only that which is presently accessible to a subjective judgement) and implicitly, a kind of neutral monism (a distanciation from traditional substance-metaphysics but acceptance of a ‘self-evidently true’ human subject whose self-consciousness and unity of thought is postulated as the ground for objectivity). Sebastian Rödl takes a similar approach in stating that “language and time-consciousness are the same” and that “the form of human intuition is time” (Rödl, 2018). Rödl also suggests that the primordial human intuition of a divine intellect (God or the Eternal) is intimately connected to our unique time-consciousness insofar as we think in time and we think the temporal, unlike animals who are limited to their experienced present and cannot conceive the temporal. He says “animals have no time-consciousness because they respond to the present situation and do not think by means of it, whereas the divine intellect has no time-consciousness because He thinks from nowhen and not by means of a time” (ibid). Rödl’s main claims are deployed against empiricism, specifically in arguing that ‘temporal thought is structured in virtue of its logical form’ (not deductive logical form, but rather a transcendental logical form) and ‘not in virtue of its sensory content’. Therefore, echoing Kant, Rödl argues that conscious thought is not possible merely through the acquisition of experiences via our sense-perceptions, but necessarily through a ‘generic thought’, a pre-existing form of human subject (or the form of human life as he calls it) endowed with innate categories of the temporal, through which we understand everything else. Whether such claims have any credible scientific backing is a different matter (although of critical importance, especially since terms such as ‘intuition’ are notoriously vague and contested within cognitive sciences) but this new idealist tendency within contemporary metaphysics opens up the possibility of conceiving the problem of time and its bearing on the hard problem of consciousness in a new manner. Towards a meta-temporal framework Rödl’s argument, much like Kant, is simply that the operations of human subjectivity including particular forms of thought, language and knowledge, cannot be grasped without a prior constitution of innate and generic form of thought reflected in the categories of the temporal. But it seems that a deeper problem of time (a meta-problem of time, in some sense) is implicit in such a formulation – namely, whether such a form of generic human subject and its innate intuitions of the temporal ‘pre-exist’ (that is, exist temporally prior to) particular, contingently instantiated human experiences, or if that ‘generic form’ itself is merely a retroactive ascription by particular subjects (where temporal priority is on the discrete and contingent human impressions that constitute its experience, through which temporal intuitions are acquired) – this is the kernel of rationalism vs empiricism and its inherent contradictions. Rödl builds his argument against empiricism precisely by presupposing the rationalist position on innateness of temporal intuitions as opposed to its acquisition through discrete experiences and conditioning. The foundational assumptions of every metaphysics and contradictions within them are underpinned by a host of such priorities and dislocations that are driven by assumptions about time and temporality, which can be characterized as a meta-temporal framework of thought. We see such priorities across different systems of philosophy throughout history, which prioritizes between: being vs becoming, identity vs difference, relations vs relata, whole vs parts, particulars vs generalities, innateness vs discreteness, typicalities vs instances, collective vs individual, contingency vs necessityand so on. The characteristic trait of attempts toward a middle-ground/neutral ontology is to relativize such dislocations by denying the privilege of one over the other and foregrounding the ‘co-constitutive’ nature of all such antinomies/contradictions, even while implicitly carrying meta-temporal assumptions on auxiliary grounds within specified areas of its application. Hegel, for instance, locates all such contradictions within nature itself (and not in human reason, like Kant), specifically in history which he identifies with a Divine Spirit that is moving towards an understanding of itself (realization of freedom), while prioritizing identity over difference and necessity over contingency (the translation of every seemingly-contingent event into a necessity is the core operation of his dialectics). Post-structuralists like Deleuze, on the other hand, prioritizes difference over identity and contingency over necessity, wherein every ‘apparent’ necessity itself is interpreted as an assemblage of contingent configuration of events. Within metaphysics and philosophy in general, we find a plethora of debates concerning such issues that betray the subtle oscillations that capture what we referred to as the meta-temporal framework of thought. Let us see how this unfolds within certain issues in philosophy of science. When it comes to philosophical debates about natural laws, in the broadest sense, one can be either an anti-realist (following David Hume’s empiricism) or realist (anti-Humean) in interpreting the metaphysical status of laws. Humeans (exemplified by figures like Bertrand Russell, David Lewis or more contemporary philosophers like Barry Loewer) adhere to probabilistic interpretations of laws wherein there are no necessary connections that govern the actualization of events, but merely a mosaic of spatio-temporal facts from which humans, through observation, derive generalities to varying degrees of appropriateness. The empiricist picture of causality and laws inherited from Hume is particularly evident when one says that natural necessity and the picture of governing-laws are just theological vestiges from a bygone era (Loewer, 1996). For their hero Hume, causality itself is an emergent phenomenon ungrounded in any natural necessity - which is to say that we impose such necessary connections to a regularity or ‘constant conjunction of events’ and thus, even the ‘relation between the causal arrow and the temporal arrow is merely a matter of semantic conventions’ (Price & Weslake, 2009). So, for Humeans, there is no intrinsic temporal asymmetry in reality other than the one we impose upon symmetric relations by labeling the ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ states of a pair of appropriately related events as ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ (ibid). In any case, it remains evident that they, as empiricists, prioritize (which is invariably a tensed-priority) discrete impressions in sense-perception over generic forms of thought or a priori intuitions, contingency over necessity and difference over identity. Time or tense is thus presupposed even while denying it. Realists (contemporary figures in physics like Tim Maudlin or Sheldon Goldstein, for example) adhere to an interpretation of laws that foreground ‘typicalities’ which are postulated to capture structures that govern the instantiation of events (by determining what events are possible and what are not). Their impulse to ascribe priority to typicalities is carried by the assumption that the direction of time itself is irreducibly real and fundamental (Maudlin says that the temporal asymmetry is a fundamental fact of reality without a spatial counterpart) and therefore ontological priority is also implicitly postulated as a tensed (temporal) formulation. Even those who deny the reality of time and claim that time itself began at the moment of Big-Bang (the past-hypothesis assumes that universe must have begun at a point of incredibly low entropy) presupposes a tensed-formulation to state either that time ‘began’ to exist (what begins to exist except in time?) or that space ‘pre-existed’ time (already implying tense). On the other hand, those who foreground the fundamentality of time have to take recourse to an infinite past under naturalistic assumptions, (since time cannot begin to exist by itself if it is fundamental) which is partly why Smolin, who takes time as fundamental, postulates meta-laws derived from conditions in prior universes that gave rise to the specific set of laws in this universe, drawing inspiration from Penrose’s cosmological model). Conclusion All these dislocations are precisely the consequences of what I referred to as the meta-temporal framework of thought, which guides the dialectical acquisition of scientific knowledge and yet reveals nothing about the mystery of time itself. The metaphysics of consciousness also presupposes this very dislocation insofar as qualia is often postulated (by idealists, panpsychists and dualists of various kinds) as something holistic that pre-existed the particular brain/neuronal configurations. Physicalists, on the other hand, typically presuppose the metaphysics of atomism insofar as the formation of and interaction between particles, neural networks and electro-chemical signals in the brain are prioritized, which then generates the projection of qualia which is not substantially real, but only apparently so. Whether qualia ‘pre-existed’ brain processes might seem rather silly to physicalists, but an understanding of the meta-problem of time makes it clear that the terms ‘pre’ (which is tense/time) and ‘exist’ (the quality of Being / to Be) are indicators of just those two mysteries that we have no grasp on, as yet. Therefore, the problem of time remains as intractable as the hard problem of consciousness and solving one hard problem without solving the other might just be a pipe dream.