In recent years, my main research focus has been on subjective time, on how and why we experience temporal properties and phenomena the way we do. In connection to this theme, I have put forward the position I call the dynamic snapshot view. It is a realistic view of temporal phenomenology and thus maintains that we have immediate experiences of change, motion, and many other temporal phenomena. However, contrary to the specious present theorists, it maintains that what we experience is a knife-edge. Furthermore, I argue that temporal phenomenology can and should be explained without appealing to short-term memory.
I’ve also argued for isomorphism between the experienced timing of events and the time of the brain states realizing the experiences, something which is less evident than one might assume. The view I call the non-linear latency difference view subscribes to such isomorphism. It provides a theoretically more parsimonious and empirically more plausible account of postdiction effects, such as apparent motion and the flash-lag effect, than the alternative theories. Since the explanation is based on the well-known perceptual processes preceding perceptual experiences (i.e., due to Stalinesque revision), the postdiction effects turn out to be neutral as to the theories of consciousness and time consciousness.
My TIAS project is about writing a monograph where I elaborate on these theories and extend the discussion to address related issues, such as the discreteness of perceptual processes and the continuity of the stream of consciousness. In addition to the mentioned theories, I’ve also argued, for example, that time appears to slow down during accidents for a subject, that perceived simultaneity is transitive, and that the studies concerning our ability to estimate intervals are held with the naive view that the duration of stimuli matches with the duration of the experience of stimuli. That is, such time perception studies are partly inadequate in their explanation since they do not take into account the temporal properties of the states based on which we make the estimations.
My other notable line of research concerns the cognitive penetration of perceptual experiences, as it is commonly understood by philosophers. That is, I ask, given certain important caveats, do cognitive states such as beliefs and concepts we possess influence our perceptual experiences. For reasons based on theoretical considerations, results from psychophysical studies and the known neurophysiology, I’ve been more cautious about admitting that cognitive penetration occurs than many of my colleagues. Quite the contrary, I’ve argued that many of the alleged cases of cognitive penetration are not such. Nonetheless, I am not altogether against such a possibility and have suggested a case of cognitive penetration on my own.
As regards the other current research themes, I have a continuing interest in the question of what colors are. I did my dissertation on this topic — defending and providing a constructive account of color eliminativism, a view that the external world has no properties we can identify colors with — and I hope to return to this topic in the somewhat near future. Through my ongoing collaborative projects related to problem gambling, I’ve been increasingly interested in the questions of why people begin to gamble and why they continue to do so. Several factors, ranging from social and economic ones to the personal traits of a gambler, obviously contribute to such activities. The factor that I’ve been most interested in is (what I take to be) an overemphasized role of dissociative experiences in the explanations of the etiology of problem gambling and the ethical consequences of making it as one of the main factors.