We live in a 4D world, but we experience it only via a narrow time window, which we call the ‘present’.
All our experiences occur within this time window. What has happened before the present, becomes the past. What has not happened yet is the future. We can only act in the present! Within this window, the here and now, we have direct experiences only via our senses, the sensory inputs via the ‘ground floor’ of the ‘neural building’ as discussed above.
Every part of the 4D world that is not within this window is not experienced directly.
One could immediately ask, as Augustine did for the first time in the 5th century AD, how long is the ‘present’? He concluded that the present has an infinitely short duration, that is to say, the present does not exist.
The classic work of William James had suggested that the ‘specious present‘ moment involves a perception of a unified entity with temporal coherence1. A similar idea also was raised by Edmund Husserl as the ‘primal impression’2.
Current evidence suggests that the perceived present probably lasts a few seconds. It is only within this window that we have the conscious experience of initiating, changing, stopping or modifying our actions. The lower limit of the experience of the present is about a 1/40 of a second, as demonstrated in the 1800s by the physiologist, Hermann von Helmholtz. Surprisingly, however, the upper limit of this present has not yet been clearly elucidated by experiments in psychology and neuroscience. Indeed, there are very few studies on this problem.
Merleau-Ponty3 stated “at each moment in a movement, the preceding instant is not forgotten, but rather is somehow fit into the present, and, in short, the present perception consists in taking up the series of previous positions that envelop each other by relying upon the current position.” These anticipatory processes, of which there are many, allow the motor system to correct or re-organise action on-the-go in response to unforeseen events4.
The sense of agency for a particular action depends on its effect falling within a specific time window that varies to some degree5. Thus, subjects have a full sense of agency where delays between action and effect are less than 334 ms. But once the delay approaches a window that overlaps with the integration scale, subjects experience lesser degrees of the sense of agency (for delays between 334 ms and 707 ms) or a loss of the sense of agency (for delays beyond 707 ms). This sense of agency is about 3 s long.
The sense of the present requires some time interval between event and effect to be regarded as caused in the present time6. Delays in sensory feedback and action affect the sense of control since the sense of time passing is always projected to the next action.
The sense of the present and near future underlies each step taken while walking. To avoid setting foot on a snake, as it happened to me on a bushwalking trip, one must interrupt the planned step just in time. In 1969, climbed the Cervino (Matterhorn) with a couple of local friends and guides to change some ropes for the tourist climbers. On the way back, I discovered that guides, when on their own, never tie themselves together with safety ropes, in memory of the Englishman, Edward Whymper, the first successful climber from the Swiss side, who fell with many of his guides, three of whom died roped together. Since then, every guide descends montains unroped. So, we did. I found myself thinking at every step that it was a matter of life and death: one step at a time!
Considerations on the all-important present have been made by such culturally diverse thinking as the little poem, Carpe Diem, by Shakespeare:
“What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure”.
…or by ruler of the Florentine Republic, Lorenzo de Medici with his poem:
“Quant e’ bella giovinezza
che si fugge tuttavia!
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia;
di doman non c’e cercezza
(Youth is beautiful and grand
but passes quickly.
Who wants to be happy, listen:
There is no certainty in tomorrow).
…or in Buddhist philosophy with its the idea of living fully the present.
This makes us think that having a sense of the present is important for survival and that this depends on the particular relation we have with the world.
- S Gallagher & D Zahavi (2012): The Phenomenological Mind. 2nd edition, Routledge. ↩︎
- E Husserl (1964): The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Indiana University Press. ↩︎
- M Merleau-Ponty (1945 / 2013): Phénoménologie de la perception / Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by DA Landes, Routledge. ↩︎
- A Berthoz & J-L Petit (2008): The Physiology and Phenomenology of Action. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
- C Farrer et al (2013): The time windows of the sense of agency. Consciousness and Cognition 22, 1431–1441. ↩︎
- H Hogenddom (2022): Perception in real-time: predicting the present, reconstructing the past. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 26, 128-141. ↩︎