From the Agent’s Perspective: Action and the Temporality of Experience

Summary

The paper argues for an extensional account of temporal consciousness, suggesting that the temporal properties we experience align with the properties of our experiences. It critiques existing views on introspection's role in understanding temporal properties and proposes a new argument based on bodily awareness. The author suggests that understanding agential awareness can reshape how we view extended experiences, advocating for a processual interpretation rather than one prioritizing whole intervals over their parts.

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Abstract

Abstract Does experience itself unfold in time? This paper defends an extensional account of temporal consciousness—on which the temporal properties we directly experience match the temporal properties of experience itself—while drawing upon features of agential awareness. After showing that recent debate on the ability of introspection to settle the question about the temporal properties of experience leaves us in a dialectical impasse, I develop a new argument in favor of the extensional account based on introspection into, and veridicality conditions of our awareness of (some) bodily actions. I then address the appropriate framing of the temporal character or ontology of conscious experience on the extensional view, in light of the claims concerning agential awareness. I discuss and critique a prominent version of the extensional account, according to which temporally extended experiences covering whole intervals possess explanatory and metaphysical priority over their temporal parts. I proceed to suggest that attention to facets of agential awareness yields the outlines of a position on which extended experience should rather be understood as processual in its temporal character.

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