This seminar is hosted by the Future of Humanity Institute and Institute of Science and Ethics

Speaker: Dr Ian Phillips, Lecturer, Philosophy Department, University College London

Abstract: In situations of extreme danger, subjects commonly report experiences of time 'slowing down’. Subjects with psychotic psychopathology commonly report experiences of time ‘speeding up’.

Such experiences are puzzling in their own right. They have also been thought to conflict with what I have elsewhere called a naïve view of temporal experience according to which there is a match between the temporal properties of our experience itself and the temporal properties of the objects of our experience. In this talk I criticise both extant philosophical and psychological approaches to such cases for their failure sufficiently to recognize the existence of streams of conscious thought and action running alongside the stream of passive sense experience. In the light of this criticism, I offer an alternative account of subject experience in both extreme and more mundane cases of temporal plasticity. This account is entirely consistent with the naive view.

Biography: Dr Ian Phillips is a Lecturer in philosophy at UCL and a Fellow by Examination at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous articles on topics in metaphysics, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Ian was recently awarded the William James Prize for Contributions to the Scientific Study of Consciousness by Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. He is currently working on a book entitled Experience and Time.