Embodied Temporalization and the Mind-Body Problem

Embodied Temporalization and the Mind-Body Problem James Mensch, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague One of the most remarkable passages in Victor Klemperer’s memoire of living as a Jew in Nazi Germany concerns a pencil and paper that a guard gives him half-way through his week of imprisonment. Sentenced for violating the blackout regulations, he is plunged into despair. He feels surrounded by nothingness: “the nothingness around me because I am cut off from everything, the nothingness inside me because I think nothing, I feel nothing but emptiness.” ndnotes Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 409. Receiving the pencil and paper, he recounts, “At that moment my life was just as much transformed as when the prison door slammed shut. Everything was lighter again, indeed had become almost light.” Ibid., p. 412. As he also relates: “On my pencil I climb back to earth out of the hell of the last four days.” Ibid., p. 413. The action of writing saved him “from the obsessive search for thoughts.” Writing, he “felt this relief again and again.” Ibid., p. 414. How are we to understand this remarkable effect of seeing his thoughts expressed in writing, i.e., having them present such that he can return to them, correct them and add to them? Anyone who has written an extended letter, a paper, or a book knows how essential it is to confront one’s thoughts on paper or a computer screen. The experience is one of the silent processes of thought becoming present in a form that can be repeatedly made conscious. Moreover, reading what one has written affects the unconscious process and stimulates it to come forward with new thoughts, which, as conscious, affect in turn the unconscious process, provoking further thoughts. This experience runs counter to the view held by most cognitive scientists, who take our conscious representations as epiphenomenal. For Frank Jackson, for example, such representations have as much causal reality as a rainbow. “They do nothing, they explain nothing.” They are simply “a useless by-product” of our evolutionary development. Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32: 135, 134). His very experience of writing his famous article, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” undermines this view. Such an experience involves a constant shifting back and forth from the anonymous brain processes that result in thought and the conscious presence of such thought. Without the latter, particularly in thought’s presence as written down, no extended process of thinking would be possible. This is true for the modern age that relies on writing. In mnemonic cultures such as those of ancient Greece, the permanent conscious representation was held in memory. In what follows, I am going to explore what this need for conscious presence tells us about the mind’s relation to the brain. My focus will be on the embodied temporalization that results in such presence. Husserl’s Account of Temporal Consciousness David Chalmers expresses the general consensus of cognitive scientists when he writes that “the really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of ‘experience.’” It is the problem of the “subjective aspect” of our perceptions, for example, “the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field.” David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3):200-19, 1995, p. 3. This “felt quality” refers to contents in their qualitative presence, contents that cognitive scientists term “qualia.” As felt, qualia are not just contents, but contents that we are aware of perceiving. The distinction, here, is that, for example, between a camera’s registering of light and its perception by us. Unlike the camera, we are aware of receiving the light. Such self-awareness distinguishes the conscious apprehension, say, of redness and redness as an objective quality, i.e., as something independent of consciousness. We not only bring this color to consciousness, but are aware of our seeing it. As a result, the quality is not just present, but felt to be so. The question is: how is this possible? What are the processes involved in this? Husserl’s analyses of our inner consciousness of time present a detailed account of such processes. The account begins with our receiving impressions from the external world. They are the “source point” for our perceptual experience; Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, p. 29. without them, “consciousness is nothing.” This means that consciousness does not produce them, rather they are "received.” Ibid., p. 100 Now, the fact that we do receive externally provided impressions does not in itself produce a sense of time. A successive consciousness of such impressions is not consciousness of their temporal succession; something else is needed. Kant’s term for this is “reproduction.” He writes, regarding its necessity, “if I were to lose from my thought the preceding [presentations--Vorstellungen] ... and not reproduce them when I advance to those which follow, a complete presentation [Vorstellung] would never arise.” “Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1. Aufl.” A102, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: George Reiner, 1955, 4:79. For the presentation of an extended temporal event, we have to retain our presentations or impressions. They cannot vanish with their moments into pastness, but must be reproduced. This reproduced presence cannot be that of an actual presence since what is actual is now, but what is reproduced cannot be now. If we are to have a consciousness of the temporal succession of impressions, the reproduced must be present as past, i.e., as having departed from the now. In Kant’s words, the necessity here is to “distinguish time in the succession of impressions [Eindrücke] following one another.” Ibid. A99, 4:77. Husserl, in his own account, accepts these necessities. For an account of Kant’s extensive influence on Husserl see Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964). He responds to them through his doctrine of retention. To introduce his position, Husserl describes the experience of listening to a melody. As new tones sound, within a certain margin of diminishing clarity, the previous tones continue to be present. This makes it possible for us to hear the melody, enjoying the relation of the tones. The already sounded tones are not present the way the sounding ones are; rather, they undergo continuous modification. They “die away,” they get fainter and fainter. This dying away is not a physical phenomenon. The tone that has sounded and yet is still present is not a “weak tone.” It is not an “echo” or a “reverberation.” Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins p. 31. Yet, even though no sensuous contents are there to sustain its presence, we still have the experience of holding it fast for a while, our grasp of it getting weaker and weaker. For Husserl, a “retention” is this experience. A retention is a consciousness of the dying away or sinking down of what we impressionally experience Ibid. As Husserl observes, there is a certain analogy between this dying away and the contracting of a physical object as it gets further away from us. Like the physical object, “[in] receding into the past, the temporal object also contracts and in the process becomes obscure.” Ibid., p. 26. Ultimately, it disappears altogether. Now, just as we learn to interpret the contracting and diminishing clarity of the physical object as its departure from us in space, so we come to interpret this dying away of a tone as its departure into pastness. As a result, “a primal interpretation” is attached to each successive phase of the dying away, one that takes it as having sunk down further into pastness. Ibid., p. 92. What is the process that produces this dying away? Husserl asserts that it is a serial process. In his view, the retention of an impression, which presents the impression as having sunk down, cannot vanish with the moment it inhabits. It must be retained and “this retention itself is a now in turn, something actually existing.” Ibid., p. 29. With the expiry of its now, this retention of the impression is, itself, retained, and so on serially. Thus, the retention “changes into retention of retention and does so continuously.” The result is that “a fixed continuum of retention arises in such a way that each later point is retention for every earlier point” (ibid.). What we have is a chain of retentions of retentions of retentions … of some original impression. The same holds for a temporal phase consisting of a sequence of successive impressions. Each of these impressions has its own continuity of attached retentions and the whole phase is retained in a continuity of such continuities “belonging to the different timepoints of the duration of the [temporal] object.” Ibid. Although Husserl speaks of “different time points” and distinct impressions, he is careful to note that this is an abstraction. He writes that the “running off phenomenon” of dying away “is a continuity of constant changes. This continuity forms an inseparable unity, inseparable into extended sections that could exist by themselves and inseparable into phases that could exist by themselves, into points of the continuity.” This means that the individual “parts,” “phases” or “points” “that we single out by abstraction can exist only in the whole running-off.” Ibid., p. 27. The claim here is that the retentions composing the running-off phenomenon are nothing for themselves. They do not function individually. Thus, when Husserl speaks of “retention” as the experience of the dying away of some content, he does not mean an individual retention. The reference, rather, is to the process in which retention “changes into retention of retention and does so continuously.” This process is one of constant “modification” of the retention. A retention’s reproduction of a previous retention is not a replication. Each successive retention is a fainter presentation than the last. The impression that is presented through the increasing chain of retentions contracts and becomes more obscure. The process is thus experienced as a fading away. We interpret this experience as the sinking into pastness of what we retain. Husserl’s account of the genesis of this experience is far more detailed and complex than the brief summary provided here. It is accompanied by an equally detailed account of anticipation or as, he terms it, “protention.” For an extensive presentation of Husserl’s description of retention and protention see James Mensch, Husserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010) pp. 59-113. As with retention, we can only indicate its main features. The chief of these is that anticipation or protention arises from experience. We learn from experience that the style of the past continues into the future. Objects that we have experienced as showing us first one side and then another continue to unfold themselves in this style of perspectival appearing. More specifically, processes that unfold in a particular sequence tend to exhibit the same type of sequence. Thus, having learned to catch a ball, we anticipate where it will be when it reaches us and place our hands accordingly. This anticipation becomes more and more concrete—the anticipated position of the ball more and more definite—as the ball advances towards us. Thus, as Husserl observes: “The further the event advances, the more it offers for differentiated protentions, ‘the style of the past is projected onto the future’” and becomes more definite as the event advances. Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), ed. R. Bernet and D. Lohmar. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 38). The experience here is the reverse of retention. The process of retention results in an object becoming more obscure, less detailed. The protentional process is experienced as presenting the anticipated object in a constantly clearer and more defined manner. This continual modification of what we anticipate is, like retention, the result of a serial process. The projection of the style of the past on to the future is a projection of the retentional chains through which we grasp departure into pastness. Projected, the retentional chains become protentional series. The result, as Husserl writes, is that “[e]very preceding protention is related to every following one in the protentional continuum just as every succeeding retention is related to every preceding one of the same [retentional] series. The preceding protention intentionally contains all the later [protentions] in itself (implies them); the succeeding retention intentionally implies all the earlier ones.” Ibid., p. 10. All the relations are the same except that the projection reverses them. It takes the relations to the past as they are seen from the now and projects their order, starting from the same now, on to the future. This flipping over of their order makes the future a kind of mirror image of the past. Thus, the further in the past the retentional chain positions an impression, the more obscure it is. Conversely, the further in the future the protentional chain positions the impression, the more obscure it is. It achieves its clarity as it approaches the present, even as a retained impression loses its clarity as it departs from the present. The same reversal holds for the way these chains intentionally contain their impressions. While the retentional chain is an already-having of an already-having ... of an original impression, the protentional chain is a having-in-advance of a having-in-advance ... of a future impression. The retentional chain, which begins with an actual having of an impression, continually lengthens, while the retentional chain decreases until it ends in an actual having the anticipated impression. While we interpret the diminishing clarity of what we retain as departure into pastness, we take the increasing clarity of the protended as an approach to the now. Temporal Consciousness and Self-Awareness According to Husserl, self-awareness is built into the above. He puts this in terms of the fact that without the retentional and protentional processes, we only have the successive presence of impressions occupying the now. With these processes, these impressions appear to approach us from the future and depart from us into the past. The consciousness that contains them thus appears as a “stream of consciousness,” one that flows from the future through our now into the past. Husserl asserts that “the being of the flowing is a self-perceiving. Ibid., p. 44. In fact, it is “completely understandable” that a consciousness, structured so as to have “a backward reference to the old and a forward reference to the new … is necessarily a consciousness of itself as streaming.” Ibid., pp. 47-48. The point follows since the awareness of receding into pastness and approaching from the future is an awareness of the results of the retentional and protentional processes. It is thus an awareness of consciousness’s own action of retention and protention. Thus, in regarding the streaming, consciousness regards itself. As Husserl also puts this, the retentional and protentional processes of consciousness result in its self-transformation. Through their action, its retained contents shift further into the past and its protended contents move further towards the now. This self-transformation, which is ongoing, gives us “a steady consciousness of streaming, of being in transformation.” Ibid., p. 47. A regard to the streaming is thus a regard to the transformation that is the very process by which consciousness constitutes itself as a temporal stream. Its awareness of this self-transformation is thus a self-awareness. There is a certain auto-affection in this self-awareness. In grasping its transformations, which occur through its own processes, consciousness is affected by these transformations. Thus, the transformation of a retention into a retention of itself presents consciousness with a new datum. It is affected by the presence of this datum, a presence that it has, itself, produced. The presence of this datum is not that of externally provided impression, whose immediate presence is one of nowness. The presence exhibits a diminished clarity. We experience it as a stage in the dying away of the impression, a dying away that we take as the impressional content’s increasing pastness. This affecting presence is thus part of consciousness’s self-presence as past. Moreover, all the simultaneous contents that form the momentary content of consciousness simultaneously expire and continue dying away at the same rate. In doing so they yield the data that presents perceptual consciousness to itself, not as it is, but as it was in a receding past moment. The same point holds with regard to the protended contents that form our anticipations and make present an anticipated consciousness of some event. They, too, affect the consciousness that generates them. The consciousness that is affected is consciousness in the now. This consciousness consists of momentary impressions, retentions and protentions. The retentions and protentions position the nowness of the momentary impressions as a nowness between the past and the future. Such nowness is “standing” since it always stands at the center of the temporal continuum. It is, however, also “flowing” since the impressional contents that define it as now are constantly being replaced. Their replacement is one with the shift of the now with regard to the continuum since the contents that did define it as now expire and are transformed into retentions. The now with new impressional content, thus, has, an increased past behind it. In fact all of the retentions that define this past have undergone retentional modification, becoming retentions of themselves. The same modification, in reverse order occurs with the protentional chains that define the future. Thus, the impressional now is grasped as advancing or flowing with regard to the temporal continuum. Given the above, we can see how, from a Husserlian perspective, we do not just perceive an enduring object but are aware of our perceiving it. The perception of a temporally extended object requires retention and protention, these being the processes that produce self-awareness. To be conscious of the object is, thus, to be conscious of our perceiving it. Take, for example, a perception of a three-dimensional object. To grasp it as three dimensional, we have to successively view its different sides. We also have to assign a referent to the perspectivally arranged pattern of perceptions afforded by this experience. Picking out the perceptions that we take as having this single referent—say, a chair that we walk around—we take them as perceptions of this referent. Perception, here, is a synthetic process, which involves uniting different perceptions and taking them as perceptions of a given object. Now, such a process would be impossible if we did not retain the perceptions that we just had as well as anticipate those that we expect to have. Without retentions, we would have no material to unite. Without protentions, we could not make our way in the world, e.g., use our anticipations to guide us as we walked around the chair. Given this, the chair that we do perceive is present through the retentional and protentional processes. As such our perceiving of it is always accompanied by a background self-awareness. Our seeing, no matter what its object, is always self-aware. We do not just perceive the qualities of a given object; such qualities are grasped as qualia. Their presence to us is a felt presence, one that involves our own self-presence, our own auto-affection. Writing extends this self-presence. The presence that writing enables, according to Husserl, is highly mediated. It begins with the perceptual process that gives us a given state of affairs, say the presence of furniture in a room. Each day, you enter the room, the same perceptual presence reoccurs and is recognized as such. Regarding the room, you can verbally describe this recurring presence of the furniture and their relative positions. Such action presupposes a linguistic community, where, as Husserl writes, “the product of one subject can be actively understood by the others” (p. 371.). Others can take your words and re-enact the perceptual experience the words express. Doing so, they can perceptually confirm your description of the room. If you write down this description, then you need not even speak to them. They can confirm your written description. As Husserl observes, writing “makes communication possible without immediate or mediate personal address.” Freed from the presence of the original author or auditor, a written text is, in Husserl’s phrase, “communication become virtual” (ibid.). All that it requires is the capacity to reactivate the meanings that its words express. Such capacity extends beyond the perceptual confirmation of your words. Others, reading your description can imagine the room by drawing on their own perceptual experience. This capacity to reactive the meanings expressed by words is, in fact, behind any written composition. By virtue of it, , Victor Klemperer can describe his experience of being in prison, read it, correct it, and add to it. The ability to write down his thoughts and reactive them on reading is what made possible the extended dialogue Klemperer had with himself as he composed his memoires over the years. This ability is grounded in and shares the self-awareness of the perceptual process. Presuppositions of the Hard Problem of Consciousness Husserl’s account of our self-awareness would, I suspect, prove unsatisfactory to cognitive scientists. The “hard problem” for them involves not just the felt-quality of qualia and the self-awareness underlying this but also, more importantly, the physical processes underlying them. We know that this felt-quality has a physical basis, but, as Chalmers writes, “we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.” “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” p. 3. The objection to Husserl’s account would thus be that he speaks only of conscious processes, but the really hard problem is to relate these to the physical processes from which they arise. What is required, in Chalmers’ view, is an “explanatory bridge” that would link conscious processes to “the structure and dynamics of physical processes.” Ibid., p. 6. So formulated, the hard problem of consciousness dates at least from John Locke’s time. As Locke states it, we can grasp how a change in “the size, figure, and motion of one body should cause a change in the size, figure and motion of another body.” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books 1995), p. 444)=. But how do such motions “produce in us the idea of any color, taste, or sound whatsoever”? In fact, he asserts that “there is no conceivable connection between the one and other.” Ibid., p. 445. Leibniz makes a similar assertion. “Perceptions,” he claims “are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions.” He continues: “Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception” (Leibniz, “Monadology” in Basic Writings, trans. George Montgomery [La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1962], p. 254). The long history of this problem and its apparent insolubility are surprising since, on a practical level, we are always solving it. When we are awake, our embodied consciousness continually makes present the results of our brain processes. There is, as I initially observed, a continual shifting back and forth between such processes and our conscious representations. At issue, then, is not the fact of their connection, but our understanding of this fact. This suggests that what undermines this understanding is not so much the problem itself. It is, rather, the way we frame this problem. To see this, we have to grasp what the problem presupposes with regard to space and time. We can do this by turning to Kant. Kant argues that if we want to grasp temporal relations, we have to turn inward, that is, regard our memories and anticipations. This is because outside of us, it is always now. The external perception that directs itself to the world cannot “see” either the past or the future. Neither is present since the past has vanished and the future is yet to come. Thus, at any given moment, we outwardly see only spatial relations. As Kant expresses this insight, “time cannot be outwardly intuited, any more than space can be intuited as something in us.” “Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2. Aufl.” B37, ed. cit., 3:52. Thus, I intuit time in its pastness and futurity through my memories and anticipations; regarding them, however, I cannot speak of their spatial relations. I cannot, for example, say that a memory (as opposed to its object) is a given size or is to the left or to the right of another memory. My memories and anticipations are not out there in space; they are within me. For Kant, this leads to the conclusion that “if we abstract from our mode of inwardly intuiting ourselves ... then time is nothing.” Ibid., B 51, 3:60. Without the consciousness whose relations it characterizes, time loses its reality. Such consciousness is, for Kant, our appearing selfhood; its reality is essentially temporal. As for the external world, it is, as revealed by external perception, essentially spatial. To see how this division results in the hard problem, we have to note how it informs the scientific account of the world. With the possible exception of psychology, science focuses on the world that we access through external perception. Doing so, it abstracts from the first-person experience given by introspection. What remains is what is called the “third-person” experience of the external, physical world. Such experience is called “third-person” since external objects are things that, not just “I,” but also “they” (the grammatical third person) can experience. In this view, my first-person experience of these objects counts as valid only if it is confirmed by others—i.e., by the “they.” Now, if we limit the validity of our claims to the third person experience of the external world, we drain from it the temporal relations that we access through introspection. Doing so, we abstract from consciousness, whose reality, according to Kant, is essentially temporal. Science’s adoption of the view appears in the mathematical and logical formulae that it employs. Such formulae can include time as a variable, but the relations they specify are instantaneous. To take the simplest example, to find out how far one has traveled, one can employ the formula: distance equals velocity times time. Thus having traveled 100 kilometers per hour for one hour, the formula predicts that one will have traveled 100 kilometers. One can work this formula for any time one chooses. Yet at whatever time one does choose, it presents you only with a snapshot. It gives you the way the world will be outwardly intuited at that point. The theoretical physicist, Lee Smolin, notes that this exclusion of time from the world also occurs when we record motion as positions at different times. In his words, “the process of recording a motion, which takes place in time, results in a record, which is frozen in time—a record that can be represented by a curve in the graph, which is also frozen in time” (Time Reborn, From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013], p. 34. The result is what he calls “the spatialization of time” (p. 35). This occurs when we “conflate the [mathematical] representation with the reality [of motion] and identify the graph of the records of the motion with the motion itself” (p. 34). From a Kantian perspective, which limits external perception to spatial relations, this conflation is inevitable once we adopt the attitude that abstracts from inner perception. In limiting us to a given now-point, science does not just drain time from the world, it also excludes the consciousness that subjectively regards it. Given this exclusion, it is by definition incapable of solving the hard problem of consciousness. If we follow the Kantian paradigm, the same point holds when we focus on introspection, i.e., first person experience. Such experience presents us only with temporal relations. Its draining off of space from the world gives us only the flow of consciousness. Space, here, is grasped in terms of this flow. Thus, the rate at which an object seems to contract and become obscure is understood as the rate at which it departs from us. Similarly, relative distances are grasped in terms of the turning (the angular velocity) of different objects. To take an example, as I walk through a room, the different objects in it show different sides to me. They visually “turn” as I pass them, and I take those that turn faster as closer to me. I experience the same phenomenon when I look out of the window of a moving car, where some objects whiz by and others, which I take as further away, hardly seem to move. The strategy here is the reverse of that of the third person perspective with its mathematization of nature. If the latter, in its using static graphs to represent motion, engages in the “spatialization of time,” the first person perspective temporalizes space. It reduces space to temporal relations. Doing so, it also makes the hard problem insolvable. Excluding the external spatial world, it cannot position within this external world the consciousness that grasps it. The Interdependence of Space and Time Because of their respective exclusions of time and space, both positions are obviously one-sided. In point of fact, we cannot speak about space apart from time or time apart from space. Astronomical distances are given in terms of the time it takes light to cross them. Similarly, we judge distances on our human scale by the time we require to traverse them: a distant town is so many hours away by car; it takes us so many minutes to walk to place, etc. This dependence of space on time is equally apparent in the fact that we use angular velocity to grasp relative distances. Absent such temporal measures, we do not have space, but only geometry. We have the mathematical representation of space, not space itself with its definite distances. Only if we conflate the two, i.e., take the representation for the represented as we do when we take a mathematical description for the reality that it describes, can we say that space can be grasped without recourse to time. To reverse this, it also true that without space, we cannot have the sense of time that is given by the flowing of our consciousness. As John Locke observed, to experience this flow, we have to experience the change or succession of our “ideas” or perceptions. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. 14 (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 122-3. Hume makes the same observation. See A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, Book I, Part II, section iii, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 35. Thus, without change, our sense of time freezes. The now ceases to “flow” when the contents occupying it remain the same. It is only when we experience the present moment with an ever new content, that we apprehend it, by virtue of our retentional and protentional processes, as a streaming present. Given that the movement of time depends on the change of such content, what lies behind this change? What is its essential precondition? The answer is that the alterity that we experience—say, the different positions of the clock’s hands—presupposes space. In space, things change their color, their position, their shape, their relation to what surrounds them, and so on. Space, in its extension, that is, in its having “parts outside of parts,” provides the framework for such change. It supplies a necessary condition for the alterity that we register as time. This does not mean that the alterity of contents is itself responsible for separating the different moments of time. Space, rather, is the ultimate reason why the moments with their different contents do not coincide. Thus, what distinguishes the appearances of a moving body are not the moments that they inhabit; it is the spatially distinct positions of its path. It is the outside-of-one-another of such positions, the extension of the path, that translates itself into the extension of time. Without this spatial extension, the path would collapse as would the moments presenting the appearances of the motion along it. The possibility of this collapse of moments shows that time cannot be conceived by itself. This can be put in terms of Aristotle’s argument that the now is not a part of time. A part measures the whole, which is made up of its parts. But the present has no extension. In this, it is like a point on a line. Neither nows nor points can be summed up to give a definite quantity. Aristotle, Physics, 218a, 5-10, 18-19. See “Aristotle, ‘Time’ from the Physics” in Time, ed. Jonathan Westphal and Carl Levenson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993), p. 61. But if moments or nows do not have any extension, what prevents them from collapsing into each other? What “spaces” them, as it were? To answer this question, we have to go outside of time to the “parts outside of parts” exhibited by space. Reinterpreting Husserl’s Account Given that space and time are inconceivable apart from one another, how are we to understand Husserl’s account of the temporal constitution of self-awareness? Consciousness is self-aware when it grasps itself as past or anticipates itself as future. Such self-awareness thus presupposes the temporal separation of the past and future from the now of their apprehension. It assumes, thereby, the “parts outside of parts” of time, i.e., temporal extension. Given that this cannot be provided by time itself, each constantly new now that becomes retained must depend upon space for its separation from the next now. The same dependence must also hold for the separation of the retentions and protentions that are successively generated with the expiration of each now. Does this dependence mean that these impressions, retentions and protentions are themselves spatial? To assert this would return us to the third-person perspective, i.e., to the abstraction that eliminates consciousness . To assert that they are simply temporal is also impossible since it would assume the first-person perspective that eliminates the external spatial world. In fact, even if we remain within the first-person perspective that Husserl adopts, there are difficulties in calling them temporal. Impressions, retentions and protentions constitute time in its apprehended reality, but as Husserl acknowledges: “Time- constituting phenomena are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them.” Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, p. 75. The point follows since neither do they endure over time nor can they be said, as momentary, to change over time. Indeed, as momentary, i.e., non-extended, they cannot even be called “parts” of time in Aristotle's sense. What then are these phenomena? What is their relation to space and time, conceived as mutually dependent? To answer these questions, we have to return to the fact that we perceive space externally and time internally. Husserl takes this divide as resulting from the two intentionalities, the two modes of presentation, that are at work in constitution. Engaging in what he calls “lengthwise intentionality” (Langsintentionalität), we focus on the “emerging, changing … and … becoming obscure” of what we perceive at each moment (Pdiz., p. 116). Doing so, we attend not just to the fading of what we have perceived but also to emerging clarity of what we anticipate perceiving. The result is our grasp of the temporal aspect of reality. Engaging in a second “crosswise intentionality” (Querintentionaliät), we cut across these retentional and protentional chains, focusing on the contents that they present with varying degrees of clarity. Here, we grasp these contents’ patterns and assign them referents, taking, for example, a specific perspectivally arranged pattern as presenting a chair. The result of this focus is the external perception that grasps the spatial aspect of reality (117). For an extended account of these two intentionalities, see Husserl’s Account of our Consciousness of Time, pp. 125-135. As Husserl’s account makes clear, both types of perception, internal as well as external, depend on the serial processes that generate the retentional and protentional chains. Now, although we experience the results of these processes in the fading or increasing clarity of retained or protended contents, the processes are not, themselves, experienced. To actually apprehend the retentional process, we would have to apprehend successive retentions, the second emerging from the first as its reproduction. The same holds, inversely, for the protentional process. But for Husserl, as we have seen, the notion of an individual retention or protention is abstraction. What this signifies is that the “time-constituting phenomena” that Husserl speaks of cannot actually be phenomena. What actually appears are only the fading and increasing clarity that respectively pertain to the two processes. The status of the “time-constituting phenomena” is, then, the following: such phenomena appear only in their results. Taken in themselves, they are prior to the internal and external perception that they make possible and, hence, prior to the apprehension of space and time. As prior, they are, in fact, the link between the two. The processes in question, thus, give us the “explanatory bridge” that the cognitive scientists seek. The bridge that is required is that between the first and the third-person perspectives. But these refer, respectively, to internal and external perception. What makes the hard problem of consciousness “hard” is the divide between the two presupposed by the problem. If we follow this divide, we can take the retentional and protentional processes objectively, i.e., as part of the external world. Doing so, we can interpret them as formal structures of the physical processes underlying perception and seek their physical analogues in the functioning of the brain. Alternately, we can adopt the first-person perspective and take them, as Husserl does, as referring to the temporal processes by which consciousness becomes self-aware. Here their analogue is the fading of the retained and the increasing clarity of the anticipated. Given, however, that external and internal perception have the same root, namely, the processes themselves, we cannot take them exclusively in either sense. To do so is to engage in the abstractions of the third and the first-person perspectives and attempt to think space apart from time or time apart from space. It is to ask how time affects space—i.e., how consciousness, conceived as essentially temporal, moves the external world. It is also to ask how space affects time—i.e., how the external spatial world, represented mathematically through the “spatialization of time,” moves consciousness. Such questions are not “hard,” but simply unsolvable. The only way to grasp the experience that Victor Klemper had of third-person brain processes affecting consciousness in its first-person reality and the reverse is to admit that time and space, conceived in isolation, are only abstractions. We experience the spatial and temporal aspects of reality through the retentional and protentional processes. But they, themselves, are neither spatial nor temporal, neither first nor third person. They are rather the processes behind both perspectives. In our embodied waking life, we constantly solve the mind-body problem by availing ourselves of them.  27