To paraphrase Paul Simon; time, time, time, see what’s becoming of me…
…so, since publishing pt1 of this series, polar winds, arctic blasts and (yet more) icy flood rains have brassed our monkeys up further. We hunker doon if we can, as the royal ‘we’ have done in our Angus home, yet again, and wait for them to be done with us.
Amidst them, we passed Blue Monday, en route away from senses of renewal and reflection engendered by a turning of the year. Views from rain streaked or frosted windows have returned to regularly scheduled Anthropocene service too.
A sense of ‘impending-ness’ we feel waiting for snow, now in mid to late January, is something different entirely to romanticised hopes for it, just for one day, experienced barely a month ago. It is analogous to that, seemingly ever-present, sense of deja-vu, of a vague and numinous dread inculcated by perma-crisis as zeitgeist.
For those whose lives were uprooted by the storms of late last year, with vain hopes of returning to flood plain homes before Christmas, it may seem just that way, to watch as the Met Office extends and shifts how serious weather warnings are, changing where and who they apply to. Shortened attention spans of rolling news coverage, inevitably complete with mis-pronounced local place names, focussed for a week or two on their plight then, equally inevitably, moved on. But every time it rains again, climate driven traumas whisper in their minds as they try to dismiss risk and threat, knowing just what happened when they did the same previously.
Hunkering, as we did, with little choice but to weather the storms which battered and bruised communities, people, lives around us, we counted ourselves ‘lucky’. Friends and neighbours watched the devastating effects of climate crisis and the surreality of global weirding rip up ill-fated conceptions of forever homes or life sustaining businesses in real time. And as they did, their gaze was hi-jacked, became media ‘content’, as familiar flood plain housing estates and developments, barely known beyond the the ancient counties they nestled in, were beamed around the world. Then they weren’t.
The distorted mirror, briefly held up to the incredulity and distress of displaced local residents, no longer reflects any version of their lives. Hopes and promises of recognition, of plight, of the need for support, extended beyond immediate appeals, of repair and return, have dissipated in its absence.
For those who were thrust into whatever scant mercies could be derived from insurance companies, as compound frustrations of force majeure clauses exact mental and emotional tolls on so recently traumatised lives, there is no moving on from this story. Their lives have been irrevocably changed by the impact of collective human action and inaction.
So too for those who were forcibly removed from council or social housing. If there are lessons to be learned, reflection to be done, surely a good place to start would be with deferred agency, what we allow, give permission for, to be done on our behalf by municipal authority.
The story arc of local representatively democratic municipality, as a character in this tragedy, is all too familiar. It was there in the denouement of a defiant pensioner, refusing to leave their council home as evacuations were increasingly enforced, because ‘the council should look after’ things.
It was there in its foreshadowing of the highest rainfall the town where that home stood, replete with, previously much lauded but now clearly not up to task, flood barriers and flood prevention schemes, had seen since records began. It was there as the media lens focussed and inevitably brought councillors, MSPs and MPs blinking into its lights, empathy and platitudes, learned, rehearsed or sincere, lines in their cameos and bit-parts, underscoring schadenfreude as a primary narrative device.
It is there too in the return of those few media outlets who saw, at least a few views or clicks, worth in a follow up report, with a focus on the third act triumph of those ‘plucky’ enough to have battled through, to have returned home or to businesses, defeating odds, declaring the surreality of a day, a week, a month before, a blur, past. Their present, then, a line drawn under its newsworthiness, a period, an end to the story.
But their present is not, cannot be, objective, is not a meta-narrative. There are other stories, alternative ethnographic viewpoints from which it is unlikely any lensed ending will be presented by UK based or focussed media for their target demographics.
For too many, particularly those who were considered vulnerable prior to Storm Babel’s exposure of frailty in us all and in all our works too, their status thus compounded, every aspect of just what the cost of an Anthropocene toll on them is, will continue to reverberate, to impact, to damage. Lives will continue to be diminished, to be made less than. For some more than others.
Considering our position as ‘lucky’, amidst this, as I did above, was a deliberate misrepresentation, narrative artifice, a pin in it, to be returned to, well, about now.
To be considered legally and/or medically vulnerable, as the nature of how my neurodivergence can manifest apparently makes necessary, requires a response, in terms of how it impacts a life. In the simplest of terms, it boils down to conceding more or less agency, or, correlatively, asserting less or more. We opted for less and more respectively.
Every aspect of our lives has had to be very carefully considered. Of course, we have had to factor in personal circumstance, but we have also deliberated long and hard over wider and long-term factors beyond our immediate control, over which we have very little personal agency. As Alex Steffens has it (and as covered in other and future posts), we have ruggedised our lives, not through luck but by very conscious design.
Just as we elected for the quiet of where we live in Angus for its lessened sensory impact on seizure thresholds, so too did we actively choose to live on a hilltop rather than deep in a glen. In a forest rather than on a flood plain.
Yet here we remain, in a just as precarious and specious present as any other. Time passes, or rather, we perceive it to pass, and events occur.
Call me obtuse but it seems particularly salient, faced with the harsh everyday, responsive, reactive and preventative choices forced upon us as humans, now, impacts of compound crises, which have causes and effects, to consider how we perceive time. And while doing so, also consider it a necessary personal and political act of grounding and understanding.
As pt1 of this series attempted to show, no matter how abstract or specific, it is almost impossible for us, as humans, to understand what changes to how we measure time do to our perceptions. Perceiving time is not associated with any particular sense; we see colours, hear sounds and feel textures but how do we perceive time?
It is worth noting, before continuing, that, given recently renewed scholarly attention focussed on time and temporality, in 2021, the Society for Cultural Anthropology presented a new reading list on the anthropology of time. It was an invitation for anthropology students, researchers and instructors to explore how time has been studied in diverse cultural contexts, so they could/can situate themselves in contemporary debates in anthropology on time’s changing contours.
It was also an invitation to encourage new conversations on the anthropology of time and temporality. It admitted to a focus mostly on people’s lived experiences of time, rather than on the philosophy or history of time in anthropology and other disciplines. The implication being that anthropologists should supplement their grounding in contemporary debates on temporality by reading beyond the ethnographies on their list and into these areas.
Which is where this is heading, but haud the bus…
…the works listed mostly demonstrate how anthropologists have approached time and temporality ethnographically. Among others, the list included writings on time in pastoral and agrarian societies and under changing configurations of capital (Sudan/Algeria/England/India); time’s association with indigeneity, race and modernity (Australia); recent monographs on time, boredom and economic precarity (Ethiopia/Romania); the importance of calendric times, national times and times of unrest (Indonesia/Iran/Vietnam); time and violence (European borderlands); time’s relationship to fragile ecologies and global futures; and critiques of ethnography.
They foreground how time is created, experienced, manipulated and resisted as people live and struggle through the upheaval and uncertainty of ecological, economic, political and social crises. This blog would argue all themes, as expressed by the list, are relevant to pts1 & 3 of this series and to the first half of this post, pt2. The second half, as follows, relates more to the supplemental grounding, referred to above and admitted to by its authors as conspicuous by omission from the list.
So, picking up where we left off, before diverting, relevantly and briefly, it would seem odd to say we see, hear or touch time passing, other than in an allegorical or metaphorical sense. Even if all of our senses were prevented from functioning for a while, we would still notice the passing of time through changing patterns of thought.
Alongside how this relates to consciousness and how we perceive space relative to it, perception of time and how we experience it gives rise to more questions than answers. The various cognitive processes through which we are made aware of time (and which influence the way we think time ‘really’ is) are inevitably concerned with the psychology of perception. These, also seemingly inevitably, give rise to philosophical issues and context, discussed at some length in other posts here.
As is this blog’s want, never shying away from the long form, exploring if not all context of an idea, certainly as much as can be managed within reasonable bounds of comprehension in a post to it, it is worth noting where these relate specifically to perception of time psychologically. In particular, whether and how aspects of our experience can be accommodated within philosophical or metaphysical theories concerning the nature of time and causation.
Even the expression ‘perception of time’ appears to invite objection. Insofar as time is something different to events, we do not perceive time as such but changes or events in time. Arguably, we do not perceive events only but also their temporal relations. Thus, just as it may appear natural to say we perceive spatial distances and other relations between objects, it also appears so to talk of one event following another.
What we perceive, we perceive as present, as going on right now. Can we perceive a relation between two events without also perceiving the events themselves?
If not, then it seems we perceive both events as ‘present’. In which case we must perceive them as simultaneous, not successive. This is, of course, a paradoxical notion, regarding which it is possible to advance a relatively straight forward solution.
When we perceive B as coming after A, we have surely ceased to perceive A. In which case, A becomes memory.
Narrow conceptions of perception exclude any element of memory. Applying these regarding time, we would have to say, we do not perceive B as following A.
Rightfully construing what it is to ‘perceive’ more broadly, to include a wide range of experiences of time, involving the senses, in which we perceive a wide variety of temporal aspects to the world of experience, any paradoxical elements appear resolved. It is worth exploring those aspects in order to understand how such perception is possible.
There are a number of these defined by what Ernst Pöppel (1978) calls ‘elementary time experiences’. These are the experience of i) duration, ii) non-simultaneity, iii) order, iv) past and present, and v)change, including the passage of time.
It is possible to consider that experience of ‘non-simultaneity’ is the same as experience of ‘order’, in time. It appears, though, when two events occur very close together in time, we can be aware they occur at different times without being able to say which came first. (Hirsh & Sherrick, 1961)
Likewise, it is possible to think perception of ‘order’ is itself explicable through experience of distinction between ‘past and present’. Certainly, these perceptions seem linked, but it is questionable whether the experience of tense (if there is such a thing at all), experiencing an event as past or present is more fundamental than the experience of order, or vice versa.
It is also not inconceivable to see links between the perception of time order and the perception of motion. This is particularly so if the latter simply involves the order of different spatial positions of an object. This too, though, raises questions worth exploring.
One of the earliest recorded discussions of how humans perceive time is in St Augustine’s ‘Confessions’, written between 397 and 400CE. During the course of, inevitably given the autobiographical nature of the text, an exploration of time and its relation to God, ‘Confessions’ raises the following conundrum:
When we say an interval of time is short or long, what is being described by the duration?
It can’t be what is past, since that has ceased to be. What is non-existent cannot presently have any properties, such as being short or long. Neither can it be what is considered in the present because the present has no duration. While an event is ongoing, its duration cannot be assessed.
Augustine’s answer is that what we are measuring, when we consider the duration of an event or interval of time, is in memory. It remains the case today, in the present, that we must concede perception of temporal duration is crucially bound up with memory.
More specifically, it appears memory of the beginning and end to ‘an event’ allows us to perceive or form a belief about its duration. We are measuring the event or interval itself, as a mind-dependent occurrence and doing so by means of psychological process.
The psychological process(es) in question are intimately connected with what Friedman (1990) calls ‘time memory’, or memory of when a particular event occurred. Friedman suggests we infer, albeit unconsciously, the duration of an event, which has ceased, from information about how long ago the beginning of that event occurred.
That is, information which is metrical in nature is derived from tensed information. But how do we acquire tensed information?
Friedman illustrates the possibility of it being direct or indirect via two models of time memory. He calls the first the ‘strength model’.
If there is such a thing as a memory trace, which persists over time, we could judge the age of a memory, as well as how long ago the event remembered occurred, from the strength of the trace. This would provide a simple and direct means of assessing the duration of an event.
Unfortunately, this model comes into conflict with a familiar feature of memory. Some memories of recent events fade more quickly than those of more distant ones, particularly where more distant events are more salient or meaningful.
A contrasting model, which may account for this, is what Friedman called the ‘inference model’. According to this, the time of an event is not simply read off from an aspect of the memory of it, but is inferred from information about relations between the event in question and other events whose date or time is known.
This model is plausible enough when dealing with distant events but less so for more recent ones. Inference appears more appropriate for distant perception of time and strength for less distant.
Our perception of the passage of time, or of time passed, to be distant or less so, also depends upon our perception of the present. It is also important, considering this, to distinguish between perceiving the present and perceiving something as present. To help make this distinction, it is worth also considering what William James, widely regarded as one of the founders of modern psychology, defined as ‘the specious present’.
The term ‘specious present’ was first introduced by the psychologist E.R. Clay, but the best-known characterisation of it was due to James. His definition goes as follows:
‘The prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’ (James, 1890).
But how long is this specious present? Elsewhere in the same work, James asserts:
‘We are constantly aware of a certain duration - the specious present - varying from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and another part later) is the original intuition of time.’
There are two sources of ambiguity here.
One is over whether ‘the specious present’ refers to the object of the experience, namely a duration in time, or the way in which that object is presented to us. The second is over how we should interpret ‘immediately sensible’. James’ words suggest that the specious present is the duration itself, picked out as the object of a certain kind of experience. But ‘immediately sensible’ admits of a number of disambiguations.
So, it is possible to define the specious present as either:
- the span of short-term memory
- the duration which is perceived, not as duration, but as instantaneous
- the duration which is directly perceived — i.e. not through the intermediary of a number of other, perhaps instantaneous, perceptions, or
- the duration which is perceived both as present and as extended in time
If James means the first of these, it would explain the suggestion that it could last up to a minute. But this does not seem to have much to do specifically with experience of presentness, since it is certainly possible to hold something in short-term memory and still recognise it as past.
James may perhaps be considering where we are listening to a sentence: if we did not somehow hold all the words in our conscious mind, we would not understand the sentence as a whole. But it is clear that words in a sentence are not experienced as simultaneous. If they were, the result would be an unintelligible jumble of sounds.
(2) is illustrated by the familiar fact that some movements are so fast we see them as a blur. What is in fact taking place at different times is presented as happening in an instant.
This is what has come to be expressed, as standard academic reference, by ‘the specious present’, despite its ambiguity and failure to consider what else may be specious about our perception of the present.
(3) is a construal that is found in related literature (eg, Kelly, 2005), but it is not obvious this is what James had in mind. Since James is concerned with the phenomenology of time perception, and whether or not an experience constitutes a direct or indirect perception of an interval, which does not seem to be a phenomenological matter.
That leaves (4): a duration which is perceived both as present and as temporally extended.
This present of experience is ‘specious’ in that, unlike the objective present (if there can be such a thing) it is an interval and not a durationless instant. The real or ‘objective’ present must be durationless for, as Augustine argued, in an interval of any duration, there are earlier and later parts. So, if any part of that interval is present, there will be another part that is past or future.
But is it possible to perceive something as extended and as present?
When we hear a short phrase of music, we seem to hear the phrase as present, and yet, because it is a phrase rather than a single chord, we also hear the notes as successive, and therefore as extending over an interval. If this does not seem entirely convincing, consider the perception of motion.
As Broad (1923) puts it, ‘to see a second-hand moving is quite a different thing from "seeing" that an hour-hand has moved’. It is not that we see the current position of the second hand and remember where it was a second ago, we just see the motion. This leads to the following argument:
(1) What we perceive, we perceive as present.
(2) We perceive motion.
(3) Motion occurs over an interval.
Therefore: What we perceive as present occurs over an interval.
There is more than an air of paradox about this. If successive parts of the motion (or musical phrase, or whatever change we perceive) are perceived as present, then surely, they are perceived as simultaneous.
But if they are perceived as simultaneous, then the motion will simply be a blur, as it is in cases where it is too fast to perceive as motion. The fact we do not see it as motion suggests we also do not see successive parts of it as simultaneous, and so do not see them as present. But then how to explain the distinction, which Broad directs attention to?
A way out of this impasse is to suggest two distinct processes are going on in the perception of motion (and other kinds of change). One is the perception of successive states as successive, for example the different positions of the second hand. The other is the perception of pure movement.
This second perception, which may involve a more primitive cognitive process or system than the first, does not contain, as part, any recognition of earlier and later elements (Le Poidevin, 2007). Alternatively, we might attempt to explain the phenomena of temporal experience without appeal to any notion of the specious present at all (Arstila, 2018).
It is possible, in human experience, to perceive as present events past. Indeed, given the finite speed in transmission of both light and sound (and the finite speed of transmission of information from receptors to brain), it seems we only ever perceive what is past.
This does not, in itself, explain what it is to perceive something as present, rather than as past. Nor does it offer any understanding of the most striking feature in our experience as-of the present: that it is constantly changing. The passage (or perceived passage) of time is perhaps its most significant aspect, and any account of human perception of time must account for this aspect of experience.
Is it possible to explain why our temporal experience is limited in a way in which our spatial experience is not?
We can perceive objects standing in a variety of spatial relations to us: near, far, to the left or right, up or down, etc. Experience is not limited to the immediate vicinity and is spatially limited, to the extent that sufficiently distant objects are invisible to us.
But, although we perceive the past, we do not perceive it as past, but as present. Moreover, experience does not only appear to be temporally limited, it is so: we do not, cannot, wholly perceive the future, and we do not continue to perceive transient events long after information from them reached our senses.
There is a very simple answer to the question why we do not perceive the future. It is causal.
Causes always precede their effects; perception is a causal process, in that to perceive something is to be causally affected by it; therefore, we can only perceive earlier, past events, never later, future ones. One temporal boundary of experience explained, right? What of the other?
There seems no logical reason why we should not directly experience the distant past. It is possible to appeal to the principle that there can be no action at a temporal distance, so that something distantly past can only causally affect us via more proximate events. But this appears to be inadequate justification.
To perceive something as present is simply to perceive it: we do not need to postulate some extra item in our experience that is ‘the experience of presentness’. It follows, from this, that there can be no ‘perception of pastness’.
If pastness were something we could perceive, then we would perceive everything in this way, since every event is past by the time we perceive it. Even if we never perceive anything as past, we could intelligibly talk more widely of the experience of pastness.
It has been suggested that memories - more specifically, episodic memories, those of our experiences of past events - are accompanied by a feeling of pastness (Russell,1921). The problem this suggestion is supposed to solve is that an episodic memory is simply a memory of an event: it represents the event simpliciter, rather than the fact that the event is past.
So, it is necessary to postulate something else which alerts us to the fact that the event remembered is past. An alternative account, and one which does not appeal to any phenomenological aspects of memory, is that memories dispose us to form past-tensed beliefs and it is, by virtue of this, they represent an event as past.
This is a possible explanation for the experience of being located at a particular moment in time, the (specious) present. And as the content of that experience is constantly changing, so that position in time shifts.
However, change in our experience is not the same thing as experience of change. Understanding how we perceive the passing of time is not just to know what it is to perceive one event after another, but also what it is to perceive an event as occurring after another. Only then is it possible for humans to understand our experience of the passage of time.
This appears to have particular relevance to the perception of time order. How do we perceive precedence amongst events?
A simple answer is that the perception of precedence is just a sensation caused by instances of precedence. Mellor (1998) rejects this for the following reason.
If this were the correct explanation it would not be possible to distinguish between x being earlier than y and y being later than x, for whenever there is an instance of one relation, there is also an instance of the other.
Yet, it is possible to distinguish between the two, so it cannot simply be a matter of perceiving a relation, but something to do with our perception of the relata. Can perception of the relata be all there is to perceiving precedence?
Consider again Broad’s point about the second hand and the hour hand. We first perceive the hour hand in one position, say pointing to 3 o’clock, and later we perceive it in a different position, pointing to half-past 3. So there are two perceptions, one later than the other.
We may also be aware of the temporal relationship between the two positions of the hand. Nevertheless, we do not perceive that relationship, in that we do not see the hand moving. In contrast, we do see the second hand move from one position to another: we see the successive positions as successive.
It is possible to consider Broad’s point, regarding perception of successive positions as successive, alongside Mellor’s proposal, that we perceive x precede y by virtue of the fact that perception of x causally affects perception of y.
We see the second hand of a clock in one position and have in short-term memory an image (or information in some form) of its immediately previous position. This image affects current perception. The result is a perception of movement.
Perceived order of different positions need not necessarily be the same as the actual temporal order of those positions, but it will be the same as the causal order of perceptions of them. Since causes always precede their effects, the temporal order perceived entails a corresponding temporal order in perceptions.
Dainton (2001) has objected to this, in that, if the account were right, we should not be able to remember perceiving precedence, since we only remember what we can genuinely perceive. But there seems no reason to deny that, just because perception of precedence may involve short-term memory, it does not thereby count as genuine perception.
There is a further disanalogy between perception of colour and perception of time order. What is perceived in the case of colour is something which has a definite spatio-temporal location. The relation of precedence, in contrast, is not something that has any obvious location.
But causes do have locations, so the perception of precedence is more difficult to reconcile with the causal theory of perception than the perception of colour (Le Poidevin, 2004, 2007).
In effect, Mellor’s idea is that the brain represents time by means of time: that temporally ordered events are represented by similarly temporally ordered experiences. This would make the representation of time unique, in terms of our perceptions.
But why should time be unique in this respect? Perhaps the brain can represent time by other means.
One reason to suppose it must have other means at its disposal is that time needs to be represented in memory and intention. But there is no obvious way in which Mellor’s ‘representation of time by time’ can be extended to these.
In Mellor’s model, the mechanism by which time-order is perceived is sensitive to the time at which perceptions occur, but indifferent to their content (what the perceptions are of). Dennett (1991) proposes a different model, in which this process is time-independent, but content-sensitive.
One of the advantages this model has is that it can account for ‘backwards time referral’, where perceived order does not follow the order of perceptions. (Dennett, 1991 & Roache, 1999)
Accounting for various aspects of time perception, inevitably makes use of concepts taken to have an apparent ‘objective’ counterpart in the world: the past, temporal order, causation, change, the passage of time etc. But one of the most important lessons of philosophy, alongside so many other fields, is that there appears to be a gap between our representation of the world and the world itself, even on a quite abstract level.
Perception of time is no exception to this. Indeed, it is interesting to note how many philosophers have taken the view that, despite appearances, time, or some aspect of time, is unreal.
Time, placed in this metaphysical perspective, continues to raise more questions than answers, particularly in academic philosophical debate.
Consider the ‘reality’ of tense, that is, our division of time into past, present and future. Is time ‘really’ divided in this way? Does what is present slip further and further into the past? Or does this concept reflect a human perspective on a reality in which there is no uniquely privileged moment, the present, but simply an ordered series of moments?
There are those who assert that what must be considered ‘true’ are not facts about the pastness, presentness or futurity of events, but tenseless facts concerning precedence and simultaneity (Mellor, 1998, Oaklander & Smith, 1994). ‘Tenseless’ theories, though, do not explain why, if time does not pass ‘in reality’, in human perception it appears to. What, then, is the basis for our experience as-of the passage of time?
Consideration given previously herein, first to temporal restrictions on experience, and secondly to experience of time order, did not explicitly appeal to tensed notions.
‘Facts’ appealed to were that causes are always earlier than their effects, that things typically change slowly in relation to the speed of transmission of light and sound, that our information-processing capacities are limited, and that there can be causal connections between memories and experiences. On these bases, it may be that the tenseless theorist can discharge any obligation to explain why time seems to pass.
However spurious such discharge may prove to be, it is clear there is no direct counter-argument, from experience, to it, since the present of experience, being temporally extended and concerning the past, is very different from any ‘objective’ present which could be postulated. Further, it cannot be taken for granted that the objective passage of time would explain whatever it is the experience as-of time’s passage is supposed to amount to. (Prosser, 2005, 2007, 2012, 2016, 2018.)
This relates to another philosophical debate which has a crucial bearing on understanding time perception. It is an ongoing, unresolved debate between ‘presentists’ and ‘eternalists’.
Presentists hold that only the present exists (Bourne, 2006), whereas eternalists grant equal reality to all times. How might his be connected to perception, do I hear you ask at the back there?
According to the indirect (or, as it is sometimes called, representative) theory of perception, we perceive external objects only by perceiving some intermediate object, a sense datum. According to the direct theory, in contrast, perception of external objects involves no such intermediary.
External objects are at varying distances from us, and, as noted above, since light and sound travel at finite speeds, this means that the state of objects we perceive will necessarily lie in the past. The presentist holds that past states, events and objects are no longer ‘real’. But if all we perceive in the external world is past, then it seems that the objects of our perception (or at least the states of those objects that we perceive) are unreal.
It is difficult to reconcile this with the direct theory of perception. It looks on the face of it, therefore, that presentists are committed to the indirect theory of perception. (Power, 2010 & 2018, Le Poidevin 2015)
To fully consider the ‘unreal’ aspects, in the context of time perception, it is necessary to also consider causal asymmetry. The account of our sense of being located at a time, considered as an aspect of past, present and the passage of time, rests on the assumption that causation is asymmetric.
‘Later’ events, cannot affect earlier ones, as a matter of mind-independent fact. This is why we do not, cannot, fully perceive the future, only the past.
But attempts to explain the basis of causal asymmetry, in terms for example of counterfactual dependence, or in probabilistic terms, are notoriously problematic. One moral we might draw from the difficulties of reducing causal asymmetry to other asymmetries is that causal asymmetry is primitive, and so irreducible.
Another is that that the search for a mind-independent account is mistaken. Perhaps causation is intrinsically symmetric, but some feature of our psychological constitution and relation to the world makes causation appear asymmetric. This causal perspectivalism is the line taken by Huw Price (1996).
That causal asymmetry should be explained in part by our psychological constitution, in a way analogous to our understanding of secondary qualities such as colour, is a radical reversal of our ordinary assumptions, but then our ordinary understanding of a number of apparently objective features of the world (tense, absolute simultaneity) have met with similarly radical challenges. Now, if causal asymmetry is mind-dependent in this way, then we cannot appeal to it in accounting for our experience of temporal asymmetry, the difference between past and future.
Further, it is not at all clear that perspectivalism can account for the perception of time order. The mechanism suggested by Mellor exploited the asymmetry of causation: it is the fact that perception of A causally influences perception of B, but not vice versa, which gives rise to the perception of A’s being followed by B.
But if there is no objective asymmetry, then what is the explanation? Of course, we can still define causal order in terms of a causal betweenness relation, and we can say that perceived order follows objective causal order of perceptions, in this sense: on the one hand, where A is perceived as being followed by B, then the perception of B is always causally between the perception of A and the perception of A’s being followed by B.
On the other hand, where B is perceived as being followed by A, the perception of A is always causally between the perception of B and the perception of B’s being followed by A.
But what, in a causal perspectivalist view, would rule out the following?
Consider a case in which A is perceived by an observer both as following, and as being followed by, B. We know that such a case never occurs in experience.
‘Is perceived by x as followed by’ is an asymmetric relation (assuming we are dealing with a single sense modality), and so one that can be grounded in causal relation only if the causal relation is itself asymmetric. If perspectivalism cannot meet the challenge to explain why, when B is perceived as following A, A is never perceived by the same observer as following B, it seems our experience of time order, insofar as it has a causal explanation, requires causation to be objectively asymmetric.
One strategy the causal perspectivalist could adopt (indeed, the only one available) is to explain the asymmetric principle above in terms of some objective non-causal asymmetry.
Price, for example, allows for an objective thermodynamic asymmetry, in that an ordered series of states of the universe will exhibit what he calls a thermodynamic gradient: entropy will be lower at one end of the series than at the other end. We should resist the temptation to say that entropy increases, for that would be like asserting that a road goes uphill rather than downhill without conceding the perspectival nature of descriptions like ‘uphill’.
Could such a thermodynamic asymmetry explain perception of time order? What does it look like through the lens of quantum mechanics? Its what quantum thermodynamics does, consider the relations between thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.
Theres a whole thesis in quantum thermodynamic asymmetry as an explanation of human perception of time order. I cant find one (though Jayne Thompson gets close!), I’d read it if I could, relate it to the anthropology of perception, but, am simply not equipped or qualified to write one; not my circus, not my monkey. I also think I’d be testing the patience and engagement of the most obdurate of readers, if my notes, for what has become an even longer post than usual, said ‘insert quantum thermo-dynamics thesis here’! Still, insert 'as close as it gets so far' here:
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, here, in Angus, like multitudes of peoples immersed in the continuous and ever-shifting, perceived realities of life lived on the planet we share, climate crisis has become absolutely in the all-too present. Media catastrophising is in the past, as is normalising accepting what is caused by the more distant past as an ongoing present.
How we respond, here or anywhere, depends upon how much agency we are willing to exert over how we perceive the future. Politicising time is not new (just ask Joseph Conrad or anyone with any interest in how GMT maintained an empire) nor is the prestidigitation required to ensure you don’t consider who does it, how and why. As Shoshana Zuboff has it, the key is in knowing who knows and who knows who knows.
You’ve made it this far, give yourself a brief palette cleanser, you know considering how adversarial and politicised oh absolutely everything can be, and stop by Kurzgesagt’s (there’s a clue to the brevity of it in their name) partnered antidote to unpicking it all. It might just change your perceptions.