The Labyrinth of Time by Anthony Peake

Author:Anthony Peake [Peake, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782120438
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
Published: 2012-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

He called it ‘specious’ because he regarded it as a ‘false’ present that describes an experience that may seem to be in the present but is actually part of the very recent past. However swift our cognitive processes may be, it takes time for light to reach our eyes from the objects in our visual field and our brain then requires even more time to process that information. In other words, whatever we perceive has to be, in a very real sense, part of the past. We can never comprehend the present moment.

The German mathematician Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) had long been intrigued by exactly what we are perceiving when we experience the ‘now’ and started writing about the subject around 1904. His extensive personal and lecture notes, which were finally published in 1928, contain some fascinating ideas regarding the nature of this perception.

For Husserl, our experience of temporal objects is processed by three separate perceptions. He called these ‘protention’, ‘retention’ and ‘primal impression’. These perceptions overlap to give us an extended perception of the ‘now’. Retention is when a part or phase of a perceptual stimuli is held within our consciousness after the stimuli has, in effect, ceased to be in the present moment and has disappeared into the past. Protention, on the other hand, is our advanced perception of the next moment, in actual fact our internal modelling of a moment that is still within the future and is yet to become actualized in the present. It is unclear as to whether Husserl considered this to be a simple anticipation or whether it is indeed some form of precognition by which consciousness can comprehend the contents of its immediate future. As we shall discover later with the work of Dick Bierman and Dean Radin, this is not such a strange suggestion as it seems. Husserl suggested that perception has three temporal aspects in which protention moves through to the present moment and becomes the retention for the next moment. In their paper ‘A Brief History of Time-Consciousness: Historical Precursors to James and Husserl’, Anderson and Grush present a musical example of the way this process works:

When listening to a melody, for instance, at any given moment a specific note will be playing. This currently-given-as-new note is the primal impression. But this note is not heard as an isolated note, but as part of a temporally extended whole. The notes that have just been heard remain in consciousness not as auditory images or echoes but in what Husserl calls ‘retention’. Retention is a process by which contents are held in consciousness and experienced-as-just-past, after having been given in primal impression when they were experienced-as-present. Part of the explanation for why the third note of the main theme of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sounds the way it does is the context which is perceptually available in consciousness, a context provided by retention of the notes that immediately preceded it. Without retention of the preceding notes, the third note

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.