Time Slice Theory: Is Consciousness as Fluid as We Think It Is?
Our brains have all sorts of shortcuts to help us experience reality more efficiently. For example, you’ve probably seen one of those tests circulating the internet with a sentence full of mispselled wrods taht dno’t raelly inhbit yuor raeding speed, as long as the frist and last lettres in evrey word are unchanged. This phenomenon may be part of a conceptual explanation known as the Time Slice Theory of consciousness, suggesting our minds stitch together a narrative of individual frames, rather than a continuous, live stream.
The paper was published on PLoS-biology by scientists Michael Herzog of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Frank Scharnowski of the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Their theory says our brains process reality in individual moments, or what they call percepts, arising in 400 millisecond intervals. These percepts are then stitched together and rendered as a continuously flowing sequence of reality that makes sense to us – much like a movie shot in high definition.
But instead of watching the movie and making judgements as we observe them, our unconscious mind reviews individual images, processes them in an abstract order, and makes subjective judgements based on heuristics from past experience. It then translates those judgements into an apparently fluid narrative, allowing you to efficiently process reality.
Time Slice Theory of Consciousness & Perception
Time slice theory says we only process reality after 400 millisecond intervals, and that there is minimal to no conscious observation between those frames; our brains only collect sensory information at discrete time-points. It is also within this period that our minds frantically work to make sense of it all.
It’s mind-boggling to think our unconscious can work so quickly, but our brains are fascinatingly powerful processors. It’s believed the mind calculates roughly 1014-1016 processes per second, or somewhere between 1 and 100 quadrillion calculations per second. The average computer functions at about half that speed.
So, what exactly happens during that unconscious judgement phase? According to Time Slice Theory, the brain processes specific features of objects, such as color and shape, quasi-consciously or unconsciously with high resolution. Within this moment there is no sense of linear time, in fact, changes in duration or even color aren’t processed. It then draws the necessary connections and stitches them together to pass off to the conscious stage.
Sometimes this period happens instantaneously and other times it takes longer, depending on the complexity of the information being fed to it. Occasionally, this leads to reactions based on false judgements, such as in fight-or-flight instances, but these instincts are naturally made to surpass the logical decision-making process, usually for survival reasons.
For instance, if someone jumps out of a closet and scares you, your unconscious perception recognizes an ostensible threat of unexpected, encroaching movement, in turn telling you to move or attack the stimulus without logical consideration.
Schizophrenics often report a slowed integration process in which the window of logical deduction takes longer and their stream of perception is fragmented.
This seems to parallel Robin Carhart-Harris’ entropic brain hypothesis regarding the Default Mode Network, the region of the brain believed to be responsible for the ego. His theory says that during a psychedelic, creative, or psychotic experience the mind sifts through more possible outcomes than it normally would, drawing from a number of seemingly incorrect conclusions to make sense of what it’s observing; with psychedelics this is what results in visual hallucinations.
Our brains can also draw false conclusions about reality while being completely aware of them. One such instance is known as the Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion; a physical deception in which a syncopated tapping of the wrist and elbow tricks the mind into feeling as if a tiny, invisible rabbit is hopping up the arm. This illusion happens because the mind infers the sensation in between the two areas of stimulation.
Listen to Alan Watts discuss our confusing perception of time:
A Similar Buddhist Theory of Consciousness
In the third century BC, the Abhidharma Buddhist School first recorded the concept of our brain’s discrete perception of reality. Their scripture refers to the threshold between conscious and unconscious awareness as the “Mind-door,” where we internalize information received through our sensory faculties.
The Mind-door characterizes the mind as the creator of subjective experience which forms the basis of memory and thought, and subsequently the micro-judgements that form the mind’s narrative. They considered the Mind-door to be our sixth sense, transcending time and making purely conceptual judgements.
Abhidharma Buddhists believed when an image reached this threshold, the mind would switch from inactive mode to any of the five-sense processes, based on whichever faculty was appropriate.
These discrete moments were referred to as dharmas – different from the teachings of the Buddha known as the dharma – used to describe experience encountered through the senses. But the dharmas weren’t simply objective experience, rather they are the product of “rapid consciousness that arise and cease in sequential streams, each having its own object, and that interact with the five externally directed sensory modalities of cognitive awareness.”
These dharmas are also described as “psycho-physical events with diverse capacities by means of which the mind unites and assimilates a particular perception, especially one newly presented, to a larger set of ideas already possessed, thus comprehending and conceptualizing it.” Sounds a lot like the Time Slice dynamic.
But Scharnowski and Herzog admit that their theory is purely conceptual and that the argument between a stream of consciousness theory and Time Slice theory remains unsettled. And while theirs is an interesting thought experiment into the way our brain processes consciousness, it doesn’t necessarily do much to answer the hard problem of consciousness itself – that is, what is consciousness?
The answer to that question remains to be understood if it can be understood in this realm at all. For more hints to help you answer such a primordial, existential question watch the documentary PHI: The Evolution of Consciousness:
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Consciousness Might Be Explained By Multiple Personality Disorder
The idea that our sentience may be the product of a conscious universe experiencing itself is not a new one – in fact, it’s the central philosophy behind more than one religion, i.e. Hinduism, Buddhism. But now, a paper published by philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, has laid out a convincing argument to reconcile this idealist theory with dissociative identity disorder (DID), otherwise known as multiple personality disorder.
Those suffering from DID exhibit at least two disparate personalities experiencing reality through distinctly separate lenses, despite inhabiting the same physical body. These personas, known as “alters,” can sometimes be completely unaware of each other’s being, compartmentalizing their lives and essentially leading parallel existences.
Scientists discovered that DID sufferers’ various alters can affect attributes of the body to the point that brain functions will literally change when a new personality takes over. For instance, EEG tests showed that the region of the brain associated with vision actually shut down while a blind alter took over a patient’s body. When a sighted alter took over, that region of the brain resumed normal function.
It’s undoubtedly difficult to lead a normal life if you suffer from DID, but if it’s possible for this level of dissociation, in which multiple personalities with their own sense of individual self can occupy a single psyche, then what’s to say that an analogous mechanism isn’t at work in the relationship between our individual consciousness and a greater universal consciousness?
Kastrup likes to call this universal consciousness “mind at large,” and he describes our relationship with it like the essence of a tree. Our individual psyches branch off in their own directions, but at their roots beneath the soil, they grow out of a greater individual organism. And the reason we’re unable to see that connection is due to that layer of soil, or what Kastrup refers to as the obfuscation of our collective consciousness.
Maybe a better example of this can be seen through the individual neuron in the brain; a microscopic cell that receives, processes, and transmits information through electrical and chemical signals. There are billions of individual neurons throughout the brain, connected through dendrites and axon fibers, which pick up small bits of data to transfer and inform the greater organ as a whole.
Our individual consciousness is much like an individual neuron in the brain, receiving, processing, and transmitting data between other neurons within synapses and neural circuits, informing the greater whole we call society and humanity. This comparison is even more intriguing when you compare images of a simulated map of the known universe with the brain cells of a living being; the similarities are uncanny.
Kastrup is a staunch opponent of the materialist view that our mind is a product of the brain. This view says that the physical world, or matter, is the fundamental substance of nature, and that it dictates reality. It says our minds, and subsequently our consciousness, can be reduced to the product of predictable, physical interactions in the brain, explained through metrics such as mass, momentum, charge, and spin.
But materialism has an irresoluble issue, known as the hard problem of consciousness; that these metrics used to define matter can’t be applied to our subjective experience of reality. We have no universal measurement to describe the way something makes us feel. Try explaining the color red or the happiest you’ve ever felt – qualia prevent our consciousness from being defined by these standards.
And according to Kastrup, any attempt to solve the hard problem of consciousness by viewing consciousness as the product of our reality is futile. Conversely, viewing reality as the product of our consciousness makes the hard problem of consciousness a moot point. You can’t prove that this reality exists without consciousness, and if we continue to try to argue this point we find ourselves trapped in circular reasoning.
There’s no consciousness in our body/brain system, our body/brain system is in consciousness. Our brain is a second-person perspective of a first-person experience. These are Kastrup’s intrinsic tenets.
When we look back at the cosmos, or our reality, we’re observing the universe’s mental processes outside of our own individual alter. Our lives are a dissociative process of the universe’s consciousness and everything we see is simply another dissociative process of the mind at large.
Has Kastrup’s monistic idealism solved the hard problem of consciousness or simply sidestepped it?
Watch the documentary Conscious States of Dying in which Stanislav Grof discusses various cultures’ perspectives on our state of consciousness after death:
