One answer might come from the views of neurobiologist Gerald Edelman, who
argues in _The Remembered Present_ that our sense of a conscious "now" or
present is always made _comparatively_ and _retrospectively_ from a moment
or so (by clock time) after the moment that seems to us to be "now". This
view has a theoretical basis, and also seeks to account for a range of
experimental perceptual phenomena (see the book) which can be interpreted
as implying that the brain compares clock-time present inputs with recently
past-time ones (remembered, or still on-going, still reverberating in the
brain) and from the differences (and invariances) gives us our sense of
what is meaningfully happening, or heard, or seen, "now".
Another way to say this, not so different from some views in Phenomenology,
is that the time-scale (in the sense of the characteristic or typical
durational time-interval over which changes occur or the processes which
constitute a phenomenon take place or complete their cycles) of
perception-process time (which is always also actional time, in the unity
of efference and afference that perception requires) is characteristically
longer than the time-scale of perceived experiential moments. What it takes
for us to perceive the now is a process that spans an interval which starts
before this now and ends somewhat after it. We "bracket" the present in
order to "frame" it.
This means, as I have argued here in other contexts, that our sense of
perceiving and acting is always going on on multiple time scales
simultaneously. That is, whatever we are doing now is simultaneously a part
of (as operations are part of actions in AT, or actions of activities) some
short-time-scale processes and also of some longer-time scale ones. Thus
our consciousness, our living dynamical being-with-the-world, is not simply
an instant by instant affair, but rather the sum (or integration,
synthesis) of many averages over various lengths of time intervals. Our
now-being extends a bit into the clock-future and a bit into the
clock-past. Indeed in some respects extends quite a long ways in both
directions, at all times.
So there is one sort of memory that may be a dynamical re-play of past
brain (and other bodily) activity, but another that is simply the on-going
continuation ("reverberation" above) of brain processes begun a bit ago and
not yet finished, thus overlapping with new incoming stimuli, and,
typically in our brains, somehow '"compared" with the newest inputs. In
fact there must be many such "echoes" of various durations going on all the
time, all somehow interacting with one another and the current input, to
produce our sense of now. By the clock, our now lags a bit behind the
incoming stream because our now depends on the synthetic activity across
all these scales, which itself takes time.
More radically, we are always in the midst of activities, actions,
operations, and sub-operations ... and these have a certain life of their
own, certain momenta that carry our personal time, or tempo, forward, on
time-scales for faster doings and doings that inherently take more time to
be accomplished. In this sense we are "anticipatory systems" (H. Rosen,
another book), which "anticipate" the future, not simply out of rational
response to long sedimented memory (the electric shock, or burn, from
childhood), but because we are already living in the future (for the
future? towards the future?), already engaged in activity which will only
be completed in the future (contingently, of course, but typically the
completions do happen). And we are so engaged not just as isolated systems
(an illusion or idealization), but as components of larger, slower systems
(dyads, groups, institutional artifact-mediated networks, social-natural
ecosystems, etc.) that are also in the midst of on-going, slower (longer to
complete) processes and activities. And so our part of this dance is
co-ordinated, even without conscious choice, with many dance partners'
movements, by the emergent organization of the whole (also contingent, but
also typically successful). We thus anticipate the moves of our partners
quite well, at least if they are within the usual repertory of the wholes
to which we belong. In this sense also we live across clock-times, into the
future, as well as dragging the echoing past with us.
The past of memory is always the past as seen from some present (and it
looks quite different as others have noted in this discussion from
different presents/futures), always dynamically re-played and
re-constituted in the context of the currently reverberating symphony of
near-present past and future. Thus the reconstituted past is remembered by
a present that is itself remembered from some future -- an instant ahead,
or a lifetime.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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