Time and Consciousness

​To what degree is time actually consciousness?  The experience of the “passage of time”, that is.  I was watching my cat eyeballing a ledge and then launching himself there with precision.
He used his brain to process various visual the stimuli from the world and predict where he would be in the future with the coordinated exertion of specific muscles.
 
This is how all behaviors work, whether we are conscious of them or not.  My cat likely didn’t think about the jump at all – maybe the advantages of the new spot, maybe auditory stimuli of possible threats in the distance, etc.  But he had a learning history, both since birth and in conjunction with his feline DNA.
 
In fact, we are conscious of only a tiny portion of our behaviors, from breathing, to balance, to absent-mindedly tapping our toes.  What is the difference between consciousness and sentience?  The latter means to feel and experience.  All animals do this, to a degree.
 
We usually refer to consciousness as “awareness”.  That is, “I am doing this”, “I did that”, “I could do that”, etc.  It’s impossible to know whether my cat is experiencing these thoughts, as he has no verbal behavior to communicate them to me or anyone else.  But he is obviously experiencing the world, and communicates in many other ways his emotions and even wishes.  When his eye and paws twitch when he sleeps, I know he is dreaming.  
 
But humans can describe ways in which we are thinking. Part of it is verbal, that is, specific stimuli arranged in a grammar that contains information about relationships in the world that takes place in a shared verbal community.  It’s really hard to self-analyze, but I’d venture a guess that most of our thinking is sort of sub-verbal, that is influenced by verbal behavior but takes place without much if any verbal stimuli.
 
When I suddenly remember to take the cookies out of the oven, I likely think, “Oh, shit, the cookies!”, but most of the information suddenly flooding into my awareness, the stimuli coming into my attention - the kitchen, the oven, the rack, maybe the smell of smoke, etc.  – I just experience without any language.
 
In behaviorism we call this a Tact, or labeling stimuli.  The stimuli evokes labeling behavior.  “Look at that”. “There it is. I’m thirsty. The cookies have been in the oven for too long.”  This allows us to chain complex logics together to create “worldviews” which link to abstract stimuli in the past and future and allow us to analyze and make plans.
 
In this complexity, we see time emerge.  My cat experiences it, through memories and stimuli relations (e.g. feeling anticipation before the bowl of food is provided). He has no verbal behavior from which to create advanced and abstract logic systems.  But he does experience relationships.  If the can is different than usual, he may become skeptical and adjust his expectations.
 
 If the can isn’t a can but say, a banana, his behavior of swishing his tail and meowing, glancing at his bowl, won’t be evoked.  There was no history of reinforcement with bananas, so no “association” between it and food.  I could hold a banana every time I feed him,  so it will soon become a “discriminative stimuli” for reinforcement (cat food).  Taking out a banana will signal the impending presence of cat food.
 
To what extent then does consciousness exist without verbal behavior?  For my cat and I, most of our experiences are not noticed by us at any given moment.  Stimuli in our bodies and in our environments around us are evoking behaviors in us but often “our mind is elsewhere”.    Maybe daydreaming.
 
To the extent that we are experiencing stimuli, attending to it, and are placing it in a context of past and present, are we creating time?  Are we merely predicting past and future events, based on logical relationships were have developed in our learning history?
 
Of course, we only have access to the past.  Or rather, stimuli in the present a relationship to which past stimuli has been reinforced.  The experience of “This is can is cat food” is related to “last time this can was cat food”, referencing a memory of the can stimuli we experienced previously.
 
Before my cat jumped on the table, I don’t know what stimuli he was attending to; it could have been a very rote, absent-minded behavior.  Yet it required both a learning history of past stimuli (similar tables, counters, ledges, etc.) and his body’s ability to jump, as well as a projection of the geometry involved that would require specific muscle movements.  He essentially planned a future scenario based on past experiences. 
 
Yet time – the passage of time – requires attention.  The phrase “time flies” appeals to subjective experience of a passage of time which one has not been attending to.  The fact that this happens when one’s attention is occupied elsewhere makes sense; you literally have not been attending to a changing series of stimuli.
I suppose one could define time as just that – a series of changing stimuli.  But the *passage of time* requires noticing these changes.  “Passage” denotes an experiential process whereby changes in stimuli are noticed and tracked.  So, you could say experiencing the passage of time requires consciousness.
 
Without consciousness, there would be no experience of a passage of time.  Changes in stimuli would occur, and they would evoke responses in an organism. But without attending to these changes, no “passage” would be recorded or responded to.  Just the moment, one to the next, in a constant state of reaction to the extent the organism is capable of response, learned or otherwise.
 
Time, unlike any other stimuli, is a dimension that requires a change to have occurred.  Up, down, left and right can exist despite change.  A location can just be.  However, time cannot just be – it *requires* two or more other dimensions to transition.
 
Consciousness likewise requires time, as it is the process of attending to changing stimuli.  But it also requires a sort of geometry in which the relationships between stimuli are analyzed and predicted, not just experienced.  An organism experiences time as stimuli change and it responds according to it learning history.  But to experience that passage of time, it must make relationships – up down, forwards, backwards, warmer, colder, more colorful, wetter, stinkier, closer, farther, etc.
 
 
What we call “attending” is responding to specific stimuli, which can be in the external environment or internal to our body (our thoughts).  We can “notice” things outside like cars or tress, as well as inside like feelings or memories.  When we are attending to time, we are attending to changes in stimuli.
 
But we can only ever attend to a glimpse of this passage, owing to our limited cognitive faculties.  Some people have been found to have the ability to recall stimuli relations far greater than average.  They can recall stimuli changes that occurred far into the past.  What they wore or ate in certain locations years ago.  I’m afraid these days I’ve become more and more goldfish-like, unable to recall relationships even hours ago!
But for the most part, the experiential passage of time is similarly limited to a sort of hour by hour, maybe day by day window in which our ability to recall changes in stimuli is acute.  This is what we call “passage” – not so much the thing itself but the intensity with which we are responding to it.  Things happening to us right now are always a “big deal”, but which fade over time.  “Time heals all wounds”, etc.
 
Our cognitive limitations require us to budget our attention.  We learn to “focus” on what is important, that is, what stimuli provides the most reinforcement at any given moment.  The passage of time, as a period of acute responding to changes in stimuli, can be considered a “behavioral repertoire”; it requires the evocation of a series of learned behaviors that create connections between past changes in stimuli.  The food was there.  Now it is gone.  I was on the floor.  Now I am on the table.  Noticing this requires attending to numerous stimuli both in the environment and in our bodies.
 
But (often mercifully), we forget and move on to allow space for processing new stimuli and relationships.  The more powerful stimuli, however, remain to varying degrees as memory. This ability to capture time – to attend to it and then remember it – seems fundamental to consciousness.  I worked with people with brain injuries once and individuals with short-term memory loss were perfectly conscious for a given period of time, but would then lose it hours or days later.
 For them, the passage of time must have felt quite different.  Only limited changes in time could be attended to.  I once sat at a table drinking coffee with a man who had no idea how long we had been sitting there.  When the waitress began to refill our coffees less frequently, he complained about the service, not realizing that a $2 unlimited refill would only last so long.   He did not realize the length of time because the memories of changes in stimuli were not being created.  Or at least, were fading too fast to be of use.

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