The Phenomenology and Predictive Processing of Time in Depression

Neemeh, Zachariah A.; Gallagher, Shaun

doi:10.5040/9781350099784.ch-011

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Phenomenologists are interested not in the qualia of greenness, but in the structural invariants that are expressed in all phenomenal consciousness, such as intentionality or the temporal structure of cognition and consciousness. We will close this section by describing the eidetic structure of what phenomenologists call time-consciousness ( Husserl, 1917/1991 ; Neemeh and Gallagher, 2020 ). We will hypothesize a way that this eidetic structure may be realized as a neurocomputational structure.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The subjective experience of time has a formal eidetic structure, what Husserl (1917/1991) calls time-consciousness. While we usually imagine time to be a linear arrow, phenomenologists contend that time-consciousness has a far more complicated, looping structure ( Neemeh and Gallagher, 2020 ). Take the perception of a melody.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cognitive neuroscientific investigation can use this eidetic structure as a guide to inquiry. For example, Varela (1999) suggests an account based in phase locking, and Neemeh and Gallagher (2020) suggest a Bayesian approach.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness

Lahav

Neemeh²

2022

Front. Psychol.

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In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this elusive phenomenon. Yet, despite critical development in our understanding of the functional side of consciousness, we still lack a fundamental theory regarding its phenomenal aspect. There is an “explanatory gap” between our scientific knowledge of functional consciousness and its “subjective,” phenomenal aspects, referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness. The phenomenal aspect of consciousness is the first-person answer to “what it’s like” question, and it has thus far proved recalcitrant to direct scientific investigation. Naturalistic dualists argue that it is composed of a primitive, private, non-reductive element of reality that is independent from the functional and physical aspects of consciousness. Illusionists, on the other hand, argue that it is merely a cognitive illusion, and that all that exists are ultimately physical, non-phenomenal properties. We contend that both the dualist and illusionist positions are flawed because they tacitly assume consciousness to be an absolute property that doesn’t depend on the observer. We develop a conceptual and a mathematical argument for a relativistic theory of consciousness in which a system either has or doesn’t have phenomenal consciousness with respect to some observer. Phenomenal consciousness is neither private nor delusional, just relativistic. In the frame of reference of the cognitive system, it will be observable (first-person perspective) and in other frame of reference it will not (third-person perspective). These two cognitive frames of reference are both correct, just as in the case of an observer that claims to be at rest while another will claim that the observer has constant velocity. Given that consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, neither observer position can be privileged, as they both describe the same underlying reality. Based on relativistic phenomena in physics we developed a mathematical formalization for consciousness which bridges the explanatory gap and dissolves the hard problem. Given that the first-person cognitive frame of reference also offers legitimate observations on consciousness, we conclude by arguing that philosophers can usefully contribute to the science of consciousness by collaborating with neuroscientists to explore the neural basis of phenomenal structures.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness

Lahav

Neemeh²

2022

Front. Psychol.

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“…Predictive processing proponents have repeatedly discussed research positing that emotionally charged mental models lead people to see weapons where there are none (e.g., Fridman et al 2019;Neemeh 2020). One experiment (Wormwood et al 2017) focused on the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and reported that angry locals tended to judge that people holding neutral objects were armed.…”

Section: Cognizing Created Realitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anticipating and enacting worlds: moods, illness and psychobehavioral adaptation

Crippen

2023

Phenom Cogn Sci

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Anticipating and Enacting Worlds: Moods, Illness and Psychobehavioral AdaptationPredictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemically distorting because they entail wide gaps between top-down models and bottom-up information inflows. Without denying this is sometimes so, the "maladaptive" label carries questionable normative assumptions. For instance, trauma survivors facing significant risk of subsequent attacks may overestimate threats to circumvent further trauma, "bringing forth" concretely safer personal spaces, to use enactive terminology, ensuring the desired gap between predicted worries and outcomes. The violation of predictive processing can go in the opposite direction too, as when depression coincides with energy-depletion, and hence objectively strenuous situations in which things look farther away because they are (accurately anticipated to be) harder to reach. These examples partly encapsulate what predictive processing theorists call "active inference," yet with differences. In the first case, actions fruitfully obviate predictions rather than fulfilling them. In the second, mental models do not dysregulate bodily processes, making coping harder. Instead, problems (e.g., personal obstacles, gastric illness) deplete energy, eliciting a depressive and adaptive slow-down. Some predictive proponents narrowly apply correspondence criteria when alleging mismatches between internal models and the world, while incongruously asserting that the brain did not evolve to see things veridically, but to execute actions. An alternative is to adopt pluralistic, pragmatic epistemologies suited to the complexity of mind. The upshot is that mental outlooks can depart from the norm without epistemically being distorted and that mismatches between anticipatory worries and outcomes, when they actually exist, can be a measure of adaptive and epistemic success.

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“…Finally, although the basic sense of time is more closely related to individual measure-ments, it can be argued that at least some aspects of the human experience correspond to the inferred posterior durations that integrate multi-modal information with memory (Von Helmholtz 1867/1906, Seth 2015, Neemeh & Gallagher 2020. In particular, studies of the phenomenology of time have suggested a separation that comprises implicit (or lived) and explicit time (Fuchs 2013).…”

Section: Bayesian Approaches To Interval Timingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bayesian sense of time in biological and artificial brains

Fountas¹,

Zakharov²

2022

Preprint

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Enquiries concerning the underlying mechanisms and the emergent properties of a biological brain have a long history of theoretical postulates and experimental findings. Today, the scientific community tends to converge to a single interpretation of the brain's cognitive underpinnings -that it is a Bayesian inference machine. This contemporary view has naturally been a strong driving force in recent developments around computational and cognitive neurosciences. Of particular interest is the brain's ability to process the passage of time -one of the fundamental dimensions of our experience. How can we explain empirical data on human time perception using the Bayesian brain hypothesis? Can we replicate human estimation biases using Bayesian models? What insights can the agent-based machine learning models provide for the study of this subject? In this chapter, we review some of the recent advancements in the field of time perception and discuss the role of Bayesian processing in the construction of temporal models.

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The Phenomenology and Predictive Processing of Time in Depression

Cited by 5 publications

References 54 publications

A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness

A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness

Anticipating and enacting worlds: moods, illness and psychobehavioral adaptation

Bayesian sense of time in biological and artificial brains

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