This is a really good question for which I don’t yet have a clear answer, despite thinking about for a fair amount of time.
For our purposes, the morally significant differences in sensory collection, processing, and integration are those differences that affect the phenomenal duration (or quality, for that matter) of the experience.
At various points in the post I appeal to an analogy between the subjective experience of time and a movie played at various speeds. But that’s not actually a good metaphor. Perceptual processing and integration is extraordinarily complicated. Our brains take in a huge range of information across our different senses, and this information comes in at different speeds. Different parts of the brain process and integrate this information in different ways, modulating the integration for differences in the speed with which different modalities deliver information, eventually presenting us with what appears to be a unified cross-sensory model of our environment. In principle at least, it seems as if the different steps in this complicated chain of events could be run at different speeds, and it’s still unclear to me what the effect would be on conscious experience.
This is a really good question for which I don’t yet have a clear answer, despite thinking about for a fair amount of time.
For our purposes, the morally significant differences in sensory collection, processing, and integration are those differences that affect the phenomenal duration (or quality, for that matter) of the experience.
At various points in the post I appeal to an analogy between the subjective experience of time and a movie played at various speeds. But that’s not actually a good metaphor. Perceptual processing and integration is extraordinarily complicated. Our brains take in a huge range of information across our different senses, and this information comes in at different speeds. Different parts of the brain process and integrate this information in different ways, modulating the integration for differences in the speed with which different modalities deliver information, eventually presenting us with what appears to be a unified cross-sensory model of our environment. In principle at least, it seems as if the different steps in this complicated chain of events could be run at different speeds, and it’s still unclear to me what the effect would be on conscious experience.