Do you expect that subjective experience of time differs significantly between regions of an animal’s brain or between modalities/senses?
You might think that humans are doing a lot of extra computational work that slows us down and contributes to our experiences, but a lot of what matters might be happening faster at a lower level or just different part of the brain.
And, as you point out, CFF is only a visual measure.
Also, if I experience vision at a rate of X per second, and sound at Y per second, then, ignoring other senses, for my overall experience of time, should we use the max of X and Y, the sum, or something else? Maybe this doesn’t matter, because the welfare-relevant measures aren’t based on basic senses, but rather the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an experience (under hedonism), which might be more unified, although I’m not sure.
One argument for the sum: the experiences across modalities won’t necessarily line up temporally or be fully integrated, or they might matter at a level before full integration.
One argument for the max: if they are fully integrated, and it’s only what happens after full integration that matters, then each modality’s rate is a lower bound on the actual rate after integration, since we know a the whole brain can process at least that fast. Or, rather than the max, we should just use the range or a mean.
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.
Do you expect that subjective experience of time differs significantly between regions of an animal’s brain or between modalities/senses?
You might think that humans are doing a lot of extra computational work that slows us down and contributes to our experiences, but a lot of what matters might be happening faster at a lower level or just different part of the brain.
And, as you point out, CFF is only a visual measure.
Also, if I experience vision at a rate of X per second, and sound at Y per second, then, ignoring other senses, for my overall experience of time, should we use the max of X and Y, the sum, or something else? Maybe this doesn’t matter, because the welfare-relevant measures aren’t based on basic senses, but rather the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an experience (under hedonism), which might be more unified, although I’m not sure.
One argument for the sum: the experiences across modalities won’t necessarily line up temporally or be fully integrated, or they might matter at a level before full integration.
One argument for the max: if they are fully integrated, and it’s only what happens after full integration that matters, then each modality’s rate is a lower bound on the actual rate after integration, since we know a the whole brain can process at least that fast. Or, rather than the max, we should just use the range or a mean.
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.