The Sensory Deprivation Tank – A Time Machine

Abstract

This paper explores Henri Bergson’s understanding of time in relation to the experience of the sensory deprivation tank. In this exploration, the tank is presented as a time machine: a machine that separates time from space and takes the floater into an experience of what Bergson describes as pure time. At the same time, the tank acts as a kind of phenomenological epoché that, through the disabling of the floater’s sensory‐motor schema, literally suspends the human being outside of the world and forces them to reconsider their previous judgements and understandings of consciousness and time. The tank is tied in with contemporary scientific and philosophical discourses on consciousness, such as those of David Chalmers and what he has described as the hard problem of consciousness. As Chalmers discusses, the hard problem requires a radically new type of thinking beyond contemporary science and its inherent materialistic and mechanistic worldview. The tank is presented as a machine that could play a part in this radical rethinking of consciousness—a literal black box working through the black box problems of consciousness.

A Ghost in the Shell or an Anatomically Constrained Phenomenon? Consciousness through the Spatiotemporal Body

“…Phillips argues that the sensory deprivation tank does not eliminate consciousness (this is a fact) but reveals it as pure time in the Bergsonian sense. Darkness and suspension of the body would produce a consciousness devoid of spatiality, like a state of pure time (Phillips, 2021) (this raises the question of whether the process of spatialization can be reduced to temporalization, which could be understood as quantified time through action-perception loops). Leaving aside the fact that the subject in the sensory deprivation tank still has interoception and can still produce imaginative acts and hypnagogic states with eyes closed, probably induced by phosphenes, glows, and muffled sounds of the water, this experience is characterized by an extension of one's spatiality and temporality and by an accentuated self-expansion that replaces the external world, rather than an elimination of space in favor of a pure temporal experience.…”