The question "Why Now?", asked by Pat Hayes (jcs-online 11May 96) is, as he points out, an aspect of the phenomenology of mind, experience, consciousness, self, etc. It is not only a "hard" problem in Chalmers' sense but also a nebulous one which escapes objective discussion, and that for a good reason, as can be seen when experience is put to the center of the stage.
Many students of consciousness agree that experience is not reducible to something else (I am not the activity of a neuronal network, although I need it) and instead it is the source of thinking. It is thus worth our while to make this a guiding principle for an investigation of the topic of "now".
The (mind's) center of experience is, one could say, "always now open and active", although to changing degrees and in variable ways. It utilizes mental structures such as percepts, concepts, and words for stability, handling and exploration. But the center itself is not structured, and thus offers no handle for conceptual thinking, except a negative one.
The structures are obtained by construction (emergence, crystallization, creation, invention, etc.) as the need arises (i.e., ad hoc), or adopted from other people via communication. In principle, they are used as long as they are found adequate; otherwise they may be discarded (deconstructed, falsified, etc). Mental structures are essential for thinking but not identical with experience, because the center of experience remains unstructured. If it were completely structured, experience would be in a closed state, and (like logical and mathematical systems) could not explore outside its structures.
"Time" is one of the most ubiquitous concepts. Like all mental structures it originates as a tool of, and from, ongoing experience, specifically from the "flow" aspect of experience, from which it is taken away (abstracted, isolated), and then packaged (immobilized and standardized). After this it can for instance be subdivided into time units which can be counted. "The past" consists of archived backward extrapolations from experience (immobilizations in memory). "The future" is another (forward) extrapolation in analogy to the past, in terms of expectations and plans, which are also usually kept invariable to some degree, in oder to achieve stability and coordination of action.
But "time" is an immobilized concept, it is not experience. The flow of experience, including its "events", has a direction - an aspect which is at times neglected, as for instance in the "reversible time" concept of physical theory; but recently, Prigogine points out that the "arrow of time" is fundamental -- as it would be expected from the phenomenology of the "flow" of experience.
The foregoing is not to suggest that the use of concepts (such as for instance objects) or theories is wrong, but rather that their origin and properties need to be understood within the context of experience. For our topic this means that "now" (which means: the unstructured ongoing experience) is more original than "time". To judge "now" from the perspective of the finished "time" concept is an error: it would be an instance of a practice in which concepts are mistakenly thought to be more original than experience (this might be called "inverted use of concepts"). That this has been done for a long time (for instance by Zeno of Elea, the Pythagoreans, or by Plato) does not prove that it works.
Experience is strictly "nothing" as far as concepts are concerned, but it is central to the mind.
Herbert F. Muller
<mdmu.@musica.mcgill.ca>
EEG Dept., Douglas Hospital Montreal QC Canada H4H 1R3
PS. I have a pre-publication manuscript on this and related questions, which I cannot send by e-mail. If someone is interested, I can send a copy by regular mail for discussion; in that case please let me have your address. HFM
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