Thank you for this very insightful and information-dense article!
My sense is that critical flicker fusion is more about sampling rate than about phenomenal time per se. And also, that just because time feels slow doesn’t mean you are actually getting more experience on the whole. The critical issue here is the difference between phenomenal time and physical time (as covered in the Pseudo-Time Arrow).
In particular, one could e.g. have 1000 experiences per second and think that you are only having one experience per second (e.g. lots of very short pseudo-time arrows!), or you could have 1 experience per second but feel like you are having 1000s of them (e.g. when the single experience per second happens to have a huge pseudo-time arrow that integrates a lot of temporally-rich information). So I think CFF will be correlated with amount of qualia and subjective sense of time, but only mildly. And that to get the ground truth of “amount of qualia” we will need to see through phenomenal time as a construct.
I mean, for example, I don’t think you get different CFFs on DMT, even though your pseudo-time arrow is extremely distorted and at times “seconds can feel like eternities”.
Thank you for this very insightful and information-dense article!
My sense is that critical flicker fusion is more about sampling rate than about phenomenal time per se. And also, that just because time feels slow doesn’t mean you are actually getting more experience on the whole. The critical issue here is the difference between phenomenal time and physical time (as covered in the Pseudo-Time Arrow).
In particular, one could e.g. have 1000 experiences per second and think that you are only having one experience per second (e.g. lots of very short pseudo-time arrows!), or you could have 1 experience per second but feel like you are having 1000s of them (e.g. when the single experience per second happens to have a huge pseudo-time arrow that integrates a lot of temporally-rich information). So I think CFF will be correlated with amount of qualia and subjective sense of time, but only mildly. And that to get the ground truth of “amount of qualia” we will need to see through phenomenal time as a construct.
I mean, for example, I don’t think you get different CFFs on DMT, even though your pseudo-time arrow is extremely distorted and at times “seconds can feel like eternities”.