Blink of an Eye: Material Nature Captured in the Momentary Now. A radical 1st person perspective

Abstract

Blurring the border between science and the humanities, this book scrutinizes the relation between material nature and ourselves, doing so by means of a 1st person approach to time. It takes as primordial starting point the now’s immediacy – that is, the experiential immediacy of one’s awakenness to, and contact with, the world and our surroundings, a momentness of time that matches and aligns with the immediate presentness of the world we’re in touch with and lucidly aware of. The primordiality of such alignment of time is brought out by the fact that without it there could be no communication, no con-temporaneous society, no knowledge, all of which hinge on this synchronicity of immediate time. Such a perspective entails the overturning of the all but universal bedrock presumption of sequential time, the before and after of extended time. Instead of the transient present resting precariously on the foundational notion of an ordered, sequential time that provides for causal sequence, for chronologies, and for a past “in” the past and a future “in” the future, in the schema advanced in this book it is the past and future that perch precariously on the present – the immediate present being not the present effect of a cause but the present beginning that other notions of time are predicated on. In other words, the notion of time – as this book proposes it – is turned upside down. One might compare such a proposal to that of attempting a detour around the observational bias of searching for keys where the street light is shining, that locality being in this case 3rd person and data-compatible description – the measurable, the countable, the sequential. It is enough here to hint at the detour’s vindication by citing a previewer’s comment on an article in which I addressed the subject of immediate time: “This paper tackles what I’d say is the most important question in consciousness studies; namely, what is the nature of experienced temporality.” (Journal of Consciousness Studies, inhouse previewer of “The Nowness of Conscious Experience,” Sept. 19, 2017).