Philosophers have long struggled to understand our perceptual experience of temporal properties such as succession, persistence and change. Indeed, strikingly, a number have felt compelled to deny that we enjoy such experience. Philosophical puzzlement arises as a consequence of assuming that, if one experiences succession or temporal structure at all, then one experiences it at a moment. The two leading types of theory of temporal awareness—specious present theories and memory theories—are best understood as attempts to explain how temporal awareness is possible within the constraints of this principle. I argue that the principle is false. Neither theory of temporal awareness can be made workable unless it is rejected. Our experience of temporal phenomena cannot be understood if we attempt to break experience down into instantaneous slices. In order to understand the perception of temporal properties we must look beyond the instant. 1. Puzzlement Nao ¨vely, we think that myriad different temporal properties and relations can be made manifest in perceptual awareness. Recall, for example, the celebrated opening bars of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue during which the first B-flat clarinet, starting from a long low trill, crescendos flamboyantly through a smooth two- and-a-half octave glissando to arrive on a sustained minim concert B-flat (see below).

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The Experience and Perception of Time

Perceiving Temporal Properties

We challenge the widespread presumption that matter and objects are ontologically prior to processes and events, and also the less widespread but increasingly popular view that processes and events are ontologically prior to matter and objects. Instead we advance a third view according to which each of these pairs of categories is ontologically dependent on the other. In particular, taking a cue from an ontology of devices, we identify the object as an interface between those processes which are internal to it and those which are external to it and which it may be said to enact, thereby linking objects intrinsically to the processes in which they are involved as well as providing a more powerful determinant of object identity than more traditional, non-dynamic criteria based on demarcation from the environment. The internal processes are themselves external processes in relation to the components of the object which enact them, leading to a potentially open-ended recursive decomposition of both objects and processes in a complex web of mutual interdependency. We also discuss how matter is related to objects, and processes to events, bringing the four categories together in a diagram which clarifies the relations between them - often considered problematic - and establishes a framework for a highly general top-level ontology.

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The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events

This article develops a comprehensive philosophy-of-science for personality psychology that goes far beyond the scope of the lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts that currently prevail. One of the field’s most important guiding scientific assumptions, the lexical hypothesis, is analysed from meta-theoretical viewpoints to reveal that it explicitly describes two sets of phenomena that must be clearly differentiated: 1) lexical repertoires and the representations that they encode and 2) the kinds of phenomena that are represented. Thus far, personality psychologists largely explored only the former, but have seriously neglected studying the latter. Meta-theoretical analyses of these different kinds of phenomena and their distinct natures, commonalities, differences, and interrelations reveal that personality psychology’s focus on lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts entails a) erroneous meta-theoretical assumptions about what the phenomena being studied actually are, and thus how they can be analysed and interpreted, b) that contemporary personality psychology is largely based on everyday psychological knowledge, and c) a fundamental circularity in the scientific explanations used in trait psychology. These findings seriously challenge the widespread assumptions about the causal and universal status of the phenomena described by prominent personality models. The current state of knowledge about the lexical hypothesis is reviewed, and implications for personality psychology are discussed. Ten desiderata for future research are outlined to overcome the current paradigmatic fixations that are substantially hampering intellectual innovation and progress in the field.

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Personality Psychology: Lexical Approaches, Assessment Methods, and Trait Concepts Reveal Only Half of the Story—Why it is Time for a Paradigm Shift

1. Mind and Self 2. Phenomenal Unity 3. Phenomenal Continuity 4. Powers and Subjects 5. Alternatives 6. Minds and Mental Integration 7. Embodiment 8. Simple Selves 9. Holism 10. Modes of Incapacitation 11. Objections and Reductions 12. The Topology of the Self 13. Appendix: Reductionism

The Phenomenal Self

This work introduces a set of scalable algorithms to identify patterns of human daily behaviors. These patterns are extracted from multivariate temporal data that have been collected from smartphones. We have exploited sensors that are available on these devices, and have identified frequent behavioral patterns with a temporal granularity, which has been inspired by the way individuals segment time into events. These patterns are helpful to both end-users and third parties who provide services based on this information. We have demonstrated our approach on two real-world datasets and showed that our pattern identification algorithms are scalable. This scalability makes analysis on resource constrained and small devices such as smartwatches feasible. Traditional data analysis systems are usually operated in a remote system outside the device. This is largely due to the lack of scalability originating from software and hardware restrictions of mobile/wearable devices. By analyzing the data on the device, the user has the control over the data, i.e., privacy, and the network costs will also be removed.

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The Experience and Perception of Time

Citations

Perceiving Temporal Properties

The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events

Personality Psychology: Lexical Approaches, Assessment Methods, and Trait Concepts Reveal Only Half of the Story—Why it is Time for a Paradigm Shift

The Phenomenal Self

Scalable Daily Human Behavioral Pattern Mining from Multivariate Temporal Data

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