Time Markers and Temporal Illusions. In The Illusions of Time: Philosophical and Psychological Essays on Timing and Time Perception, edited by Valtteri Arstila, Adrian Bardon, Sean Power, and Argiro Vatakis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. AbstractAccording to the thesis of temporal isomorphism, the experienced order of events in the world and the order in which experiences are processed in the brain are the same. The thesis is encompassed in the brain-time view, a popular view on the literature of the temporal illusions. The view is commonly contrasted with the event-time view, which maintains that the experienced order of events reflects the order in which the events occur in the world. This chapter focuses on the conflict between the two views in the contexts of perceptual asymmetry in visual perception and temporal order judgment tasks. It is argued that both views mean slightly different things in these contexts. Accordingly, it is possible for one to endorse both the brain-time view and the event-time view at the same time. On the broader perspective, the chapter illustrates how time order is employed differently by various perceptual processes, resulting in different characteristics from implicit and explicit time perception.
Voisiko koneella olla mieli? [Could a machine have a mind?] With Pii Telakivi.
2018. Temporal Experiences without the Specious Present. Australasian Journal of Philosophy.AbstractMost philosophers believe that we have experiences as of temporally extended phenomena like change, motion, and succession. Almost all theories of time consciousness explain these temporal experiences by subscribing to the doctrine of the specious present, the idea that the contents of our experiences embrace temporally extended intervals of time and are presented as temporally structured. Against these theories, I argue that the doctrine is false and present a theory that does not require the notion of a specious present. Furthermore, I argue that the different aspects of temporal experiences arise from different mechanisms operating separately. If the theory is true, then temporal experiences do not tell us anything special about the nature of consciousness and its temporal properties per se.
* The winner of the Best Paper Award in AJP in 2018. You can read more about the award here.
2015. Keeping Postdiction Simple. Consciousness and Cognition.AbstractPostdiction effects are phenomena in which a stimulus influences the appearance of events taking place before it. In metacontrast masking, for instance, a masking stimulus can render a target stimulus shown before the mask invisible. This and other postdiction effects have been considered incompatible with a simple explanation according to which (i) our perceptual experiences are delayed for only the time it takes for a distal stimulus to reach our sensory receptors and for our neural mechanisms to process it, and (ii) the order in which the processing of stimuli is completed corresponds with the apparent temporal order of stimuli. As a result, the theories that account for more than a single postdiction effect reject at least one of these theses. This paper presents a new framework for the timing of experiences—the non-linear latency difference view—in which the three most discussed postdiction effects—apparent motion, the flash-lag effect, and metacontrast masking—can be accounted for while simultaneously holding theses (i) and (ii). This view is grounded in the local reentrant processes, which are known to have a crucial role in perception. Accordingly, the non-linear latency difference view is both more parsimonious and more empirically plausible than the competing theories, all of which remain largely silent about the neural implementation of the mechanisms they postulate.
2012. Time Slows Down during Accidents. Frontiers in Psychology. AbstractThe experienced speed of the passage of time is not constant as time can seem to fly or slow down depending on the circumstances we are in. Anecdotally accidents and other frightening events are extreme examples of the latter; people who have survived accidents often report altered phenomenology including how everything appeared to happen in slow motion. While the experienced phenomenology has been investigated, there are no explanations about how one can have these experiences. Instead, the only recently discussed explanation suggests that the anecdotal phenomenology is due to memory effects and hence not really experienced during the accidents. The purpose of this article is (i) to reintroduce the currently forgotten comprehensively altered phenomenology that some people experience during the accidents, (ii) to explain why the recent experiments fail to address the issue at hand, and (iii) to suggest a new framework to explain what happens when people report having experiences of time slowing down in these cases. According to the suggested framework, our cognitive processes become rapidly enhanced. As a result, the relation between the temporal properties of events in the external world and in internal states becomes distorted with the consequence of external world appearing to slow down. That is, the presented solution is a realist one in a sense that it maintains that sometimes people really do have experiences of time slowing down.
* The paper that has received the most attention from the public press (e.g., BBC Future, Medium, and Psychology Today).
2017. Cognitive Penetration, Hypnosis and Imagination. Analysis. AbstractThe thesis of cognitive penetrability, according to which cognitive states can affect perceptual experiences, remains the topic of intense debate among philosophers. A new candidate for a case of cognitive penetration is presented and defended. The candidate is based on studies involving suggestions that something is a certain way, which are usually given under hypnosis, rather than mere request to imagine that things are a certain way.
* Selected as one of the three Best of 2017 papers in Analysis.
2016. Perceptual Learning Explains Two Candidates for Cognitive Penetration. Erkenntnis. AbstractThe cognitive penetrability of perceptual experiences has been a long-standing topic of disagreement among philosophers and psychologists. Although the notion of cognitive penetrability itself has also been under dispute, the debate has mainly focused on the cases in which cognitive states allegedly penetrate perceptual experiences. This paper concerns the plausibility of two prominent cases. The first one originates from Susanna Siegel’s claim that perceptual experiences can represent natural kind properties. If this is true, then the concepts we possess change the way things appear to us. The second candidate for cognitive penetration is Fiona Macpherson’s claim that, in addition to concepts, our beliefs can penetrate perceptual experiences. It is argued that neither candidate is a case of cognitive penetration. In doing so, I provide an explanation to both that is based on perceptual learning, a non-cognitive phenomenon where relatively slow and long-lasting modifications to an organism’s perceptual system bring about changes in perception. This explanation is theoretically more plausible and remains closer to the empirical data than the explanations based on cognitive penetration.
2018. What Makes Unique Hues Unique?. Synthese. AbstractThere exist two widely used notions concerning the structure of phenomenal color space. The first is the notion of unique/binary hue structure, which maintains that there are four unique hues from which all other hues are composed. The second notion is the similarity structure of hues, which describes the interrelations between the hues and hence does not divide hues into two types as the first notion does. Philosophers have considered the existence of the unique/binary hue structure to be empirically and phenomenally well-grounded, and the structure has been considered to be primary because this can account for the similarity structure. Consequently, the unique/binary hue structure has played a central role in color philosophy. This calls for the assessment of the justification for its existence carried out in this paper. It is concluded that, despite the prevalent view among philosophers, none of their reasons for endorsing the existence of the unique/binary hue structure are justified. Since the notion of the unique/binary hue structure appears intuitively plausible for many, however, a sketch explaining this intuition is outlined at the end.
2010. Color Eliminativism and Intuitions About Colors. Rivista Di Estetica.AbstractThe philosophical debate over the nature of color has been governed by what we have learnt from color vision science and what color phenomenology suggests to us. It is usually thought that color eliminativism, which maintains that physical objects do not have any properties that can be identified with colors, can account for the former but not the latter. After all, what could be more obvious than the external world to be colored? Here I outline one color eliminativistic response to the objections based on phenomenology.