Constructing the Present

Constructing the Present: An Investigation into Time-Consciousness investigates what time is like for us as subjects and answers the question of how our experiential present comes to be. While addressing a variety of outstanding debates in the field, the book proposes that our temporal phenomenology is best understood as transcending traditional forms of analysis. The book ultimately concludes that time is not something we experience, but rather the way we construct our experience of the world.

In the spirit of William James, McKenna suggests that the present occupies a window of time known as the “specious present.” McKenna claims that the duration of this subjective window is determined by the real temporal properties of experience, but also that experiential events are, as Edmund Husserl believed, temporally directed to varying degrees and in nested fashion in a way that affects their particular qualitative character. This specific proposal is called ERA: the Extensional-Retentional Analysis of temporal phenomenology.

Besides doing justice to our temporal phenomenology, McKenna’s overall position aligns with contemporary predictive approaches to the cognitive architecture of the mind. This exciting new way of thinking sees the brain as a predictive engine whose ongoing activities construct our rich subjective experiences. Taking inspiration from this movement, Constructing the Present introduces a complementary position called Temporality as Iterative Expectation Revision (or TIER). According to TIER, temporal phenomenology results from predictive activities of the brain occurring throughout an integrated multilevel cognitive processing hierarchy. Such a system is sensitive to the ongoing flux of environmental stimuli while retaining prior expectations and constantly updating our experiences probabilistically to ensure survival. The actual activity of this ongoing process, rather than its content, gives rise to the felt present, which is continuously constructed anew.

Constructing the Present: An Investigation into Time-Consciousness functions as a scholarly defense of a provocative, plausible, and cohesive set of theses, while also confronting numerous adjacent philosophical issues along the way. By approaching the subject from the standpoint of empirically informed philosophy of mind, the present work fills a significant gap in the literature. The book should appeal especially to philosophically inclined researchers and students interested in cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as philosophy of mind.