November 25, 

Time and Perspective

Workshop

N 494 Main Quad,

The University of Sydney

 

ZOOM URL: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85947516767?pwd=h1G9eLQOHiRsG9aat8iMw3IxUiroTb.1

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9.30-11.00 (6.30-8.00 pm NY Time) Clas Weber (UWA)

The Epistemic Gap between the Personal and the Impersonal

 

There appears to be an epistemic gap between the personal and the impersonal. The apparent epistemic gap presents a challenge to reductionism about personal identity according to which facts about personal identity are grounded in impersonal facts about physical and/or psychological continuity. In this talk, I discuss and reject two strategies of closing the epistemic gap, a phenomenalist and a Cartesian one. I then motivate an alternative account of the apparent epistemic gap based on the special perspectival character of inside imagination. The imagination-based account explains the appearance of an epistemic gap, and at the same time avoids a corresponding ontological gap.

 

11.-11.15 Morning tea break

 

11.15-12.45 Rita Li (Sydney)

Transient facts in a tenseless world

 

As spatial-temporally situated beings, we represent reality from within our own spatial-temporal perspectives. Call this representational perspectivalism. Some B-theorists, those who maintain that temporal reality consists only of tenseless facts, appeal to this view to account for our tensed language. We represent states of the world using perspectival modes of presentation. While the psychological effects of those tensed beliefs and statements (being action-explanatory, emotion-inducing, etc.) comes from this perspectival mode of presentation, what makes them true are tenseless facts. As such, our irreducibly tensed beliefs raise no issue for an overall tenseless ontology. Representational perspectivalism is different from the view that reality itself consists of perspectival facts, or facts that only obtain from some perspective. Applied to temporal reality, we get the view that reality (partly) consists of temporally perspectival, transient facts. Call this temporal perspectival realism.

 

Many theorists simply take perspectival facts and tensed facts to be equivalent. That is, temporal perspectival realism entails the A-theory, as realism about tensed facts. In this paper, I argue that it is compatible with a B-theoretic, tenseless ontology. This claim rests on distinguishing two readings of the notion of transient facts. On the first reading, a transient fact is one that obtains at the time of a particular perspective. This temporal perspective that which the fact’s obtaining is relative to, is part of what constitutes the fact itself. Its obtaining, in this case, remains an atemporal, and so tenseless, matter. On the second reading, the time-relativeness rests in the fact’s manner of obtaining, in how it comes to be the case, rather than what is the case. It is only this second reading that gives us an irreducibly temporary fact that is genuinely tensed. Admitting perspectival facts understood in the first sense into her ontology allows the B-theorist to provide an alternative account for tensed language. That is, our beliefs and statements are about and made true by temporally perspectival facts. I argue that this alternative account has a few strong points over the one which draws on representational perspectivalism.

 

 

12.45-1.00  Lunch

 

1.00-2.30 Merlin Herrick, Otago

 

Time and Free Will

 

I will discuss an analogy between the philosophy of time and the philosophy of free will to suggest that the free will debate should place greater emphasis on experience. I will then apply the theories resulting from arguments from temporal experience (representationalism/illusionism/deflationism) to the free will debate, with a focus on how a deflationary account could motivate new versions of free will scepticism and compatibilism. In particular, I will draw on deflationary accounts of temporal experience such as Hoerl’s to frame a new version of free will scepticism, and draw on tenseless passage accounts such as Deng’s to frame a new version of compatibilism.

 

 

 

2.30-4.00  Shimpei Endo (Sydney)

 

Stupid Alien


Many philosophers have believed that our familiar language reflects reality. Their research program investigates a language (formal or informal) and reads off the structure of reality from the structure of the language, assuming that these structures mirror each other. This
paper maintains the link between language and reality, but considers a mostly abandoned possibility: What if the structure of reality is written in a language that is very unfamiliar to us? Following Sider's analogy and terminology, we might ask: What if the book of the world is written in an alien language? Matti Eklund is one of the few who has explored this realm of alien languages and alien structures.  Eklund attempts to defend the possibility of such alien languages and argues for the possibility that reality might be written in these unfamiliar tongues rather than our well-known ones. One way to make this argument, which I will explore, is to provide a concrete example of such languages. While Eklund is more interested in smart aliens and their richer language compared to ours, this paper focuses on simple aliens and their more limited languages.

 

4.00-5.00 Afternoon Tea 

 

5.00-6.30 

Olla Solomyak  (NYU) 9.00 AM Jerusalem time Monday 25

 

Temporal Structure and the Perspectival

 

My aim in this talk is to examine two different conceptions of what it takes for reality to have temporal structure. On one conception, the temporal structure of reality is seen as rooted in the obtainment of facts of a certain kind (e.g., tensed facts, or facts about how things are at different times). On an alternative conception of temporal structure — which I’ll argue is preferable —  the direction of explanation is reversed: the relevant temporal facts obtain becausereality has a (particular) temporal structure. I’ll develop of a version of the latter proposal that draws on the notion of temporal perspectives: It is, I’ll argue, because one or more particular perspective(s) is/are fundamental that reality has the temporal structure that it does, which then allows for the obtainment of temporal facts. I sketch a framework for thinking about perspectives and perspective-fundamentality which I develop in other work, and suggest how it might help clarify the relationship between temporal structure and the perspectival.

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August 30

Time and The Everyman Workshop 

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N 494, Main Quad, 

The University of Sydney

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Kristen Stone

Rasmus Pedersen

Anthony Bigg

Kristie Miller

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10-11.30 Rasmus Pedersen

Title: Other-directed Mental Time Travel

Abstract: This paper posits a mental capacity I call other-directed mental time travel (ODMTT). I define ODMTT as a representational capacity that is essential for engaging in a type of mindreading that involves representing complex temporal relations of another person’s past, present, and future to temporally contextualize one’s understanding of their mental states. I claim that ODMTT springs from the interaction of MTT and mindreading and that engaging in ODMTT essentially is the act of deploying our mental time travel (MTT) capacities, a self-directed cognitive capacity, in an other-directed manner. We can think of ODMTT as something that follows more or less directly our capacities of MTT and mindreading. Previous proposals that link MTT and mindreading either discuss their common neurophysiological basis without describing how this influences cognitive skills or suggest that mindreading depends on MTT, a claim that lacks substantial evidence. Instead, this paper aims to offer a new construct—ODMTT—that systematises the mentalising activities that rely on the interaction between mindreading and MTT. I take this construct to have novel explanatory value which can guide future research. For example, one must appeal to ODMTT to explain how we engage in a sophisticated kind of narrative empathy. This is because, I argue, such empathising relies on temporal contextualising the other person’s mental states relative to episodic aspects of that person’s past and future. More broadly, I argue that ODMTT enables us to engage in more accurate mindreading, vivid perspective-taking, precise reasoning about the causal origin of another’s mental states, and fairer judgments about the reasons underlying other’s behaviours. As such ODMTT structures a range of social cognitive abilities that lie at the intersection of MTT and mindreading, in turn delivering practical and theoretical insights that call for new experimental evidence and can guide future social cognition research.

11.30-1.00 Kristie Miller

Title: Doing Naturalistic Philosophy of Time

Abstract

In this paper I aim to exemplify a certain sort of naturalistic approach to the philosophy of time. The particular aspect of philosophy of time I take up is the idea both that we report having experiences as of time (robustly) passing, and that we believe that time robustly pass. In this paper I do two things. First, I outline a bunch of recent studies (much of them through the Centre for Time) that probe people’s reports regarding their experiences of time, and their beliefs about the nature of time. On the basis of this I argue that, contrary to what is often supposed, (by dynamists and non-dynamists alike), what requires explanation is *not* that people report that it seems to them in experience as though time robustly passes, or that they report believing that time does robustly pass. Rather, what requires explaining is that there is significant variation in reports in this regard. This changes the explanatory landscape. It has often been held (by dynamists and non-dynamists alike) that it seems to us as though time robustly passes, and that as a consequence people tend to believe that it does, and that it is this seeming that requires explanation. Further, it has been argued that the simplest explanation of our having this seeming is that time does robustly pass, and that this gives us a reason to endorse dynamism over non-dynamism. I argue that these empirical results suggest, to the contrary, that this is not what requires explaining, and, in fact, this variation in reports presents an explanatory challenge for dynamists and non-dynamists alike.In the service of providing an explanation of these reports I go on to consider four possible explanations for this variation. The first is what I call the open future explanation, which appeals to the idea that people differentially believe that the future is open (in some way or other) and in virtue of that come to believe that time robustly passes and to report that this is how things seem. Second, I consider persisting-self explanations, according to which differences in people’s beliefs about, or experiences of, the self persisting, explain why they come to believe that time robustly passes and to report that this is how things seem. Third, I consider agentive explanations, according to which people differentially experience themselves agentively, and this explains differences in reports regarding its seeming as though time passes, and people’s beliefs that it does. Fourth, I consider the episodic vividness explanation according to which differences in the vividness of episodic imagining of past/future events explains why people differentially report that it seems as though time passes and that they believe it does. I present new empirical evidence we collected regarding all four proposals. I will then go on to argue (time permitting!) that in fact it is the non-dynamist who has the better explanation.

1.00-2.15 LUNCH

2.15-3.45 Anthony Bigg

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TBA


3.45-5.15 Kristen Stone


Title: How can our perception and experience of time further human consciousness

Abstract:

Less of an abstract and more of an experience, we will use this time to go through Gebser's structures of consciousness (Archaic, Magical, Mythical, Mental-Rational) and into a kaleidoscopic discussion of how the group has experienced integral consciousness in everyday life. Specifically, we will explore timelessness & timefulness; integral consciousness & time; time as present-origin; and time & transformation -- all primary concepts in Gebser's book, The Ever-present Origin.
 

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January 29
Temporal Processing Workshop

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N 494, Main Quad, the University of Sydney​

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Presenters:​

Alex Holcombe, Psychology

Laura Sperl, Psychology

Rasmus Pedersen, Philosophy

Derek Arnold, Psychology

Jiahan Hui, Psychology and Brain Sciences

Brigitte Everett, Philosophy