Time and consciousness

Conscious activity is extraordinarily complex. Experiences of the past, forecasts of the future and perceptions of the present unfold, all of them very cohesive, circulating, oscillating and hovering around a center of attention. The subjectivity of consciousness makes an objective and general definition difficult, so it is described in terms of common features of conscious experience manifested by many individuals. In the 2023 paper, "Conciousness in Artificial Intelligence," 19 scientists and philosophers select various indicators based on three psychological theories of consciousness. Here I propose to consider psychological time as an essential indicator of consciousness. Unlike physical, measurable time, the perception of time is individual and non-transferable, it is as subjective as consciousness.
A review of various conscious states illustrates the inescapable presence of temporal perception. A non-trivial conversation, with common memories, emotions, projects.A stroke of fortune or a family suffering, which puts at stake the future life and/or the revision of the past.The search for a solution to a personal or social problem, even a technical one.A feeling of happiness or anguish, the deep immersion in existence, personal or general.Etc.All these experiences comprise varied episodes, intertwined and extended over time. They are not conceivable in immobility, as static pictures, as one contemplates a photo. Psychological time is in the background of consciousness, as the fabric is the weft of the embrodery. A conscious state freed from psychological time does not seem possible, just as this time is not possible without the memory of past events that were recorded preserving their causal order. Consciousness is a flash of situations intertwined and woven in the vault of time.
Consciousness is one of the most pressing problems in current philosophical and scientific thought, for which much human and economic effort is devoted to find a solution.Among so many researchers I consider the contribution of Chalmers to raise the double problem of consciousness.The hard problem, so called because it does not have a scientific way of solution, derives from subjectivity: how does conscious perception, the qualia, relate to its cerebral support?It is the basic mind/body problem.The physicalist option that faces this problem, opposed to the dualist one defended by Chalmers, extraordinarily simplifies the problem to the point of suppressing it: if the soul entity does not exist and the living being is made exclusively of matter, the qualia are, not supported in, the material brain, they themselves are their neurons and their synapses.Yes, it is very difficult to let go of the intimate feeling that what one feels is something more than atoms and molecules, but this is what the monistic vision implies.The same can be said of psychological time as of consciousness: the perception of time "is", "is not supported by", the neuronal structure, or rather, given its dynamic nature, by the synaptic traffic of information.
Chalmers' soft problem, because it is scientifically tractable, is to determine the neural configurations or synaptic propagation of information that constitute the various mental states, especially conscious states and the neural construction of psychological time.Profuse neuroscientific research is providing abundant material tending to characterize mental states by their corresponding "neuroimages".The number of neurons available is immense but finite.The number of possible synapses is also finite, although even more immense.Thus, despite the appearance of continuity of mental processes, they are discontinuous, since their neuronal and synaptic configurations are necessarily discrete.Any mental process, always locked in time, can be assimilated to a rich collection of neuronal images, just as a celluloid film is a succession of individual images, although when viewed it appears as a continuous process.But just as the frames are rigidly ordered in the film, the neuroimages must be formed in the brain following the temporal order in which they were recorded in memory. How is this order preserved? This is the neural problem of psychological time, a problem that I do not know if it is being investigated. From a physical point of view, it does not seem feasible for neurons to provide a representation of order between any two neuronal representations of a past episode; which one was earlier, which one later?Neuronal functioning provides a basis for a solution: axon-dendrite asymmetry is a localized physical fact that would make it possible to distinguish the anterior neuron from the posterior neuron in synaptic transmission. The asymmetry of this essential process may be the physical seat of the sense of time and causality.