Journal of Consciousness Studies
jcs-online thread:
Why Now?

"Multiple Nows"

Imrants Baruss

I have the same problems with time that Pat has. The variant of this puzzle that stumped me is the question "When is now?" If you think of the process of stimulation, transduction, primary projection, sensation, perception, judgment, decision-making, intitiating actions--somewhere along that line of brain processes the present exists. Everything that is now for me is clearly also the past. I never see what is going on now in the world around me, only the past. But what is the now at which point my explicit awareness is involved. If this is a constructive process as Dennett has suggested, then, as with the unity of consciousness, you would expect aberrant cases of people with multiple nows just as you have multiple Is. But I don't know of such cases. This is not an argument against their possibility, just an indication of the sorts of things that we may need to look at in order to make some sense of time.

Imants Baruss
baruss@uwo.ca
519-433-3491 Ext 352
King's College, 266 Epworth Ave, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 2M3


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