Memory, Time, and Temporal Experience

Abstract

This dissertation puts forth a series of empirically-grounded theoretical proposals about memory and temporal awareness.

After an introductory chapter setting up the stage, Chapter 2 concerns episodic memory. According to the standard view, episodic memory is both distinctively metarepresentational and, relatedly, uniquely human. I argue that the standard view conflates two closely connected yet distinct senses of `episodic memory'. More specifically, I argue that even if the phenomenally conscious contents of episodic recollective experience are metarepresentational, that does not require that the episodic memory system have a metarepresentational structure. After arguing for a first-order account of the memory system, I show how the system-experience distinction helps to render the task of demonstrating episodic memory in non-human animals empirically tractable.

Chapter 3 concerns altered temporal phenomenology in life-threatening danger. I argue that the phenomenon colloquially known as `time slowing down' turns out to consist of three distinct elements --- subjective time expansion, slowing down of perceptual motion, and timelessness. Drawing on empirical findings from a range of related fields, I explore how each element departs from ordinary, `normal' temporal experience. Collectively, these individual accounts in turn further our understanding of passage phenomenology and temporal consciousness in general.

Chapter 4 investigates the cognitive underpinnings of our intuitive belief that time passes. On my account, while this belief is less metaphysically weighty than sometimes assumed, it is still of significant theoretical interest not only because it is linked to a rich phenomenology, but also because time's dynamic character is a psychologically compelling phenomenon. Both of these features, I argue, are best accounted for by taking seriously the idea that we have something akin to an intuitive theory in the domain of time, with the belief that time passes serving as an inference-guiding principle shaping our `manifest image' of time.