background...
process...
afterthought...
The riddle of experience vs memory Daniel Kahneman...
reading list...
thanks...

999 seconds

Breathing, an instinctive act, is not something I often think about. And, likewise, until two events disrupted my inate familiarity with the passage of time - my instinct is that I move from event to event through something called time - it, too, did not consciously occupy me. If breathing is a condition necessary to live, time seems to be a necessary condition within which we live. Being present at someone's death and being absent due to general anaesthesia [1] changed this unthinking acceptance, and brought questions about temporality into focus.

The study of time is the stuff of physics and astrophysics; of physicists, cosmologists, neuropsychologists, mathematicians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. Pondered on by Anaximander, Plato and Aristotle, the problem of our concept of time is ancient, and to this day eludes an overarching definition. Starting, as I was, from a naive position I was never likely to proceed beyond asking very basic questions. Therefore, it is not surprising that only questions remain, as I learned that any enquiry into the nature of time proves to be notoriously tricky.

Background

Watching someone die, and by this I don't mean the days, hours, or minutes leading up to death, but the instant when someone is present and then they are not, begged the question how did I miss it? Why don't I remember the now-point of the act of passage out of being? Where was I if not there? How, in Willie Nelson's words, does time slip away? If cosmology is concerned with the entire universe and, by extension, humanity's place in it, my interest lies within that extension; not the enormous question of our species' place in the cosmos but something much more rooted in common experience: how, as individual human subjects do we experience time - what is 'now' for me?

Not having any experience in fields of study that concentrate on time, I cast around for somewhere to begin. The Dimension of the Present Moment an essay by Miroslav Holub gave me a starting point:

The fact that I cannot imagine the present moment has always worried me. By the present moment I mean a conscious individual state or process, an experience [...] I have finally found satisfaction in recent data of experimental psychology. The present moment lasts three seconds. In our consciousness, the present moment lasts about three seconds, with small individual differences (p.1)

Here was an actual timespan to try to position myself within. How long is three seconds? What can I experience within that length of time?

Trying to place myself within the phenomenon of a three second span and experience it seemed like a way forward. Not surprisingly this brought me to a paradox where, if it is true that I am consciously in something called the present for approximately three seconds, I am also unable to be in it as it is so fleeting. As William James put it "Let any one try. I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming." (p.608) Everything seems to happen in those three seconds, and yet nothing that happens seems tangible as it has passed into the next present moment before I am aware I am aware of it. Confused, something that I had read years before and not understood began to make sense. Digging out a book that I had found (and still do) particularly difficult - Toward a Philosophy of the Act by Mikhail Bakthin - a highlighted quotation appeared to legitimise my confusion:

Thus, insofar as we detach a judgment from the unity constituted by the historically actual act/deed of its actualization and assign it to some theoretical unity, there is [author's emphasis] no way of getting out from within its content/sense aspect and into the ought and the actual once-occurent event of Being. All attempts to surmount - from within theoretical cognition - the dualism of cognition and life, the dualism of thought and once-occurent concrete actuality, are utterly hopeless. Having detached the content/sense aspect of cognition from the historical act of its actualization, we can get out from within it and enter the ought only by way of a leap. To look for the actual cognitional act as a performed deed in the content/sense is the same as trying to pull oneself up by one's own hair (p.7)

If we can now apply the three second rule to our consciousness-span during the actualization of any act/deed, then any attempt of being-in-the-moment while separating it from its cognitive dimension becomes untenable. Before we have a chance to reflect about the present moment it has passed, or to put it another way, when we have the opportunity to think about the present moment it must have passed - if we are reflecting on it, it has gone. Being in time seems to be a continual ritual of pulling oneself up by one's own hair.

If I understand myself as being positioned in spacetime then each present moment marks my conscious existence in the continuum of the three spatial dimensions plus the fourth dimension of time. Poet Wislawa Szymborska writes "Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that I arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice." Applied to each present moment, the need to improvise underscores our naivety within the slices of once-occurent concrete actuality - the subjective, present moments, that make up the minutes, hours, days of our lives.

999 seconds is a game I played with myself in an attempt to see if I could shed any light on a subject that has become something of an obsession - now.

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Process

Initially, my idea was to record a given time span (I chose 999 seconds for no other reason than it alluded to the space in which the piece was to be shown, Gallery 333) in three second bursts, what would they look and sound like? At first film or video seemed to be the relevant media to use but chopping a continuous digital signal into three second sections seemed to be the antithesis of what I was looking for. Instead beginning with framed three second slots and trying to fashion them into a continuum seemed more apt, and so I used a camera to capture three second exposures of a 999 second time period - 333 'nows'.

one of 333 photos in 999 seconds

detail

Quite by chance a friend, Pleun Volker, sent me the link to Daniel Kahneman's talk The riddle of experience vs memory. My plans to record the sound track of the events happening around me when I was taking the 333 three second shots changed to one where I listened to Daniel Kahneman's talk instead. Here was a remarkably clear polemic on the two headed beast of the experiential moment and its passage into memory:

There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present [...] And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life.

I have to look at a transcript of the talk to type this quote to illustrate the clarity of his argument. But what did I remember of his words after a first listening? What remained with me?

Once more I have to resort to the transcript to make sure that the quotation is accurate: it is the kernel of this paragraph that stuck in my mind. After a first hearing I remembered, if not word for word, then its central theme:

Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other. And you ask: What happens to these moments? And the answer is really straightforward. They are lost forever. I mean, most of the moments of our life -- and I calculated -- you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long. Which means that, you know, in a life there, are about 600 million of them. In a month, there are about 600,000. Most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet, some how you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. And how to spend it, would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us." (07.00/20.07)

Perhaps this is the part of the talk that I remember because, like Holub, he also uses the three second rule, but perhaps it is because the words echo with an entry in my diary:

detail of diary entry August 2006

Here was the 'rub': attempting to reproduce the present moment was, I realised, futile: it became apparent that putting together the images and words engaged with in the 999 seconds was at best an exercise in producing an illustration for anyone looking at it to experience it from within their 'now' - to subsume it into their faction, as I did with my mother's photographs. The only now-ness present in Gallery 333 is that of the viewer; the only experiencing self in front of the photos is the person looking at it.

fragments of Daniel Kahneman's talk reproduced as labels for 999 seconds

It became clear that other elements had to come into play. The equation 3 seconds = Now, Now = Here captured the environment of the work and creates a framework or reference point for the viewer - perhaps, in fact, it is an order or instruction. Anyone standing and looking at the photos and text does so against the movement of the clock marking off the fourth dimesion in their timespace in three second increments. The photographs and text trapped in the box are relics which perform the same function as the people trapped in my lens during the photo shoot for 999 seconds.

999 seconds

Afterthought

Research for 999 seconds hasn't answered the question I started out with, instead it has exposed the enormous complexity inherent in exploring now-ness. I expect that in a short while I shall look back at what I've written here with embarrassment at my ignorance of the subject. In the meantime the next step is to consider Francisco Varela's writing on the specious present. His writing on the texture as well as the linearity of time suggests a way of understanding the insufficinecy of a defined, isolated, present moment:

To start with, time in experience presents itself not only as linear but also as having a complex texture [...] a texture that dominates our existence to an important degree. In a first approximation this texture can be described as follows: There is always a center, the now moment with a focused intentional content (say, this room with my computer in front of me on which the letters I am typing are highlighted). This center is bounded by a horizon or fringe that is already past (I still hold the beginning of the sentence I just wrote), and it projects toward an intended next moment (this writing session is still unfinished). These horizons are mobile: this verv moment which was present (and hence was not merely described, but lived as such) slips toward an immediately past present. Then it plunges further out of view: I do not hold it just as immediately, and I need an added depth to keep it at hand.

The riddle of experience vs memory

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Reading list

Anderson, H & Grush, R (2009), A brief history of time consciousness: Historical precursors to James and Husserl. Journal of the History of Philosophy. 47(2):277-307.

Bakhtin, M.M (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Austin: University of Texas Press

Durie, R (ed) (2000) Time & the Instant. essays in the physics and philosophy of time, Manchester: Clinamen Press

Holub, M (1990) "The Dimension of the Present Moment" in Miroslav Holub The Dimension of the Present Moment and other essays, London: Faber & Faber

James, W (1890) Principles of Psychology 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt

Szymborska, W (2009) Nic dwa razy. Nothing Twice, Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie

Varela, F.J (2000) "The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness" in Jean Petitot et al (eds) Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Stanford: Stanford University Press

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thanks

For their help and support with 999 seconds, I want to thank:

Matt Burrows at Exeter Phoenix

Megan Calver

Alan Ramsay

Pleun Volker

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