TIME, CONSCIOUSNESS AND QUANTUM EVENTS IN FUNDAMENTAL SPACETIME GEOMETRY

摘要

William James described our "stream of consciousness" as a series of what he termed the "specious present-the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible". To characterize the specious present, James cited experimental work on sound perception implying a duration of roughly 6 seconds. However James recognized that the "present" implies a durationless instant, the latter boundary of his specious present. Thus James' specious present is really "past", equivalent to what is described in modern psychology as "working memory". But what of the conscious present, or the "Now"? Leibniz, Whitehead, Barbour and the Orch OR model are each consistent with James' view of consciousness as a set of discrete moments. But do the discrete moments form a contiguous stream-in-time as James suggested, or a collage of haphazardly arranged moments whose continuity is an illusion of memory as Barbour has argued. In either case we consciously perceive a continuity, a "flow" of time (Figure 4); moreover the apparent rate of the flow of time may vary.