Great, thanks Michael—that clarifies the argument for me.
Premise 1: Any observed conscious temporal resolution frequency for an individual X (within some set of possible conditions C) is a lower bound for the maximum frequency of subjective experience for X (within C).
While I think it’s plausible that one’s temporal resolution sets some sort of bound on one’s rate of subjective experience, I just want to reiterate that I believe this is an empirical claim, not a conceptual claim. I’m open to the possibility that temporal resolution is just totally irrelevant to the subjective experience of time.
(As an aside, I think we have to be a bit careful how we (myself included) use the word ‘conscious’ in this context. In the post I distinguish behavioral methods for determining CFF from ERG methods for determining CFF. But even bees can be trained on the behavioral paradigm. This of course doesn’t settle the question of whether they’re conscious.)
Does it make sense to interpret the rate of subjective experience as a frequency, the number of subjective experiences per second? Maybe our conscious experiences are not sufficiently synchronized across our brains for such an interpretation?
This is another good question for which I don’t have the answer. A related issue is whether experiences are discrete (countable) in the relevant sense. There are arguments that pull in either direction here. But, just to clarify, even if experiences are countable in the relevant sense, it would be an astounding coincidence if our experience frequency exactly matched our critical flicker-fusion frequency (i.e., 60 experiences per second).
Great, thanks Michael—that clarifies the argument for me.
While I think it’s plausible that one’s temporal resolution sets some sort of bound on one’s rate of subjective experience, I just want to reiterate that I believe this is an empirical claim, not a conceptual claim. I’m open to the possibility that temporal resolution is just totally irrelevant to the subjective experience of time.
(As an aside, I think we have to be a bit careful how we (myself included) use the word ‘conscious’ in this context. In the post I distinguish behavioral methods for determining CFF from ERG methods for determining CFF. But even bees can be trained on the behavioral paradigm. This of course doesn’t settle the question of whether they’re conscious.)
This is another good question for which I don’t have the answer. A related issue is whether experiences are discrete (countable) in the relevant sense. There are arguments that pull in either direction here. But, just to clarify, even if experiences are countable in the relevant sense, it would be an astounding coincidence if our experience frequency exactly matched our critical flicker-fusion frequency (i.e., 60 experiences per second).