Temporal Properties (2): The Future

(1) In the present Section 4 I continue the enterprise of characterizing experience through delineating properties directly relating experience and time. The property I now have in mind specifically concerns the future (though it leads naturally to a closely related wider phenomenon). One comes across the property in the following way. Suppose one was a scientist magically transported back to (say) the year 109 BC, studying the first signs of mind and consciousness on Earth. What phenomena would indicate their presence? Doubtless certain movements on the part of living organisms: indeed, a whole new repertoire of movements-in-situation. Then just what is it these particular movements have that (say) sunflower movements tracking the sun lack?

Consider a plant's movements. These ‘actions’ or regular responses to stimulus, constitute the activation of local mechanism and in general have survival-value for their ‘agent’. Significantly, time enters in no special way into this phenomenon, and would not do so even were the plant's ‘actions’ to be a teleology across time. Thus, we might say:

‘the plant is moving in direction d1at p1t1because it is going to be at p2at the later time t2’, so indicating that ‘Nature's purpose’ lies in a future situation at t2. Yet all we would mean is, that at t1a physical state of the organism exists which is regularly followed by a different state at t2, and that this is of teleological import. What must be emphasized is, that the physical states out of which the phenomenon is constituted involve in themselves no essential reference to time.

Pre-animate teleology towards a future event is constituted out of states which are in this sense a-temporal in character.

Return now to the super-primitive animal, and its structurally novel repertoire of movements (call it Σφ) in situation.

This phenomenon cries out for explanation. And the explanation is, that Σφ manifests the presence of mentality and of conscious experience. This constitutes an explanatorial revolution. To begin with, it signals the breakdown of pre-animate teleological explanation, since no such laws can explain a Σφ which is manifestative of consciousness—ad hoc clauses mushrooming out of control! But it further involves the invoking of a new ontology and a whole new system of novel entities and types of explanation. It is the ‘emergence’ of a broad new covering category that is a suitable subject for philosophical inquiry (viz. mind), and with it new types of phenomena (viz. action, perception) and new kinds of explanation (viz. the kind philosophers call ‘mental causal’, with its attendant singularities), both likewise fit topics for philosophical investigation. We hypothesize such a novel system in explanation of Σφ, and discover that it works, as mere plant teleology does not.

The special property of experience that concerns me is already visible in this super-simple situation. But it is interestingly prefigured in the temporal character of the novel explanation. Thus, we say: ‘the animal is doing a because it is going to do b.’ This can be understood in two ways, one of which exhibits the temporal peculiarity

in question. Namely, either as an instance of a natural regularity (‘Nature's purpose’), or else as the expression of an intention (the animal's own particular purpose) (—the nomicity of ‘Nature's purposes’ to be contrasted with the relative particularity of intention explanation). Then it is the latter form of explanation that is to my mind noteworthy. ‘The bee is crossing the garden because it is going to feed on the yellow flower’ might be understood in these two ways: either as akin to ‘The bird is transporting a twig because it is going to build a nest’, or else to ‘The dog is crossing the garden because it is going to eat its meal.’ Instinctive behaviour like nest-building almost certainly does not express an intention of building a nest, but is instead expressive of many small-range intentions whose expression teleologically happens to result in a nest. The simpler the animal, the more its behaviour is of this kind: the complexends to which it appears to address itself tend to be ‘Nature's ends’, while the ends which really are its ends (i.e. its intentions) tend to be temporally and spatially small-scale. Nature takes care of the grand design, but assigns the details to the agent. In short, the capacity to organize and synthesize, and the closely related capacity to learn from experience, are proportionately smaller as the creature tends towards the primitive. Nonetheless, being animal and therefore the subject of experience, not all of its apparent purposes can be ‘Nature's purposes’. Intention must gain a foothold, bringing with it a quite special relation to the future. Roughly: no animal without action, no action without intention, and no intention without a mental posture directed towards the future (not to be confused with the capacity to think about the future).

(2) As noted above, the special temporal property of experience which interests me is already prefigured in the temporal character of the above explanation. Then what is it that is so singular about the intention-explanation from the point of view of time? It lies in the fact that we explain a present phenomenon by reference to a future phenomenon—irreducibly. In the case of plant teleology across time we explain a present phenomenon by reference to a future phenomenon, but in such a way that the reference to time can be ‘cashed’ in terms of a state and a regularity across time, and the element of time finds no essential representation within that state. And the same can be said of those explanations of animal action which refer to a future event of which the animal knows nothing and which it does not intend, as in (most probably) ‘The bird is transporting a twig to make a nest.’ But when we invoke an intention—and all intentions necessarily involve reference to the future—there is no way the reference to the future can be ‘cashed’ in timeless terms. Time lies at the heart of the intention.

To repeat. When the present intentional behaviour is explicable in terms of a future merely hypothetical phenomenon—reducibly (as in nest-building), then the explanation is not intentional and the intentions which actually do find expression in the behaviour are simply bypassed in the overall explanation. But when they are not bypassed, as for example in the case of a dog moving in the direction of some food, then we explain a contemporary phenomenon in terms of a merely

hypothetical future phenomenon—irreducibly. Here I suggest we have one great novelty appearing with the arise of experience. However, this property is explanatory, and thus relational in type, whereas the closely related property which I am at pains to delineate is constitutive. What concerns me is, not so much the unusual character of the explanation of Σφ, but the unusual character of the items involved in that explanation. In particular, of the acts whose bodily exterior constitute Σφ, and the desires and intentions they express. More specifically still, the irreducible temporal properties of these phenomena. These properties seem to me to be of great moment.

Any intentional action falls under several descriptions, one of which speaks merely of the present, another of the future; and the latter can be invoked in explanation of the former. Thus: ‘the dog is running’, ‘The dog is trying to catch the cat’, ‘The dog is running because it is trying to catch the cat.’ It is not just that the dog experiences its activity in this way: more to the point is, that the experience itself is at once ‘trying to run’ and ‘trying to catch the cat’, and irreducibly so. The one activity-experience falls essentially and thus irreducibly under two descriptions, one referring to the present and the other to the future. The very nature of this phenomenon is such that it refers across a span of time to another time, from an indexically-given temporal point of view, viz. from ‘now’. This must be borne in mind in what follows.

(3) Before I finally spell out the special temporal property of experience, it helps to recall some of the earlier observations concerning the constitutive properties of experiences. We noted that they were ‘pure flux’; and, if continuous across time, constituted out of process-parts but not state-parts (there being no experience-states). This holds of the processive experience of activity, whereas it is not true of the essentially non-experiential process of forgetting. The process of forgetting is constituted out of process-parts—like any other process; but it is in addition constituted out of state-parts. Then what is especially pertinent to the present discussion is that those state-parts are such that their essential description need not position them on any past/present/future scale: so to say, forgetting does not know itself in temporal terms. The same is true of the merely teleologically directed movements of a plant towards some naturally predestined goal lying in the future: the constituting elements need involve no reference to time.

Activity, on the other hand, which is constituted out of nothing but activity-process parts, and in particular out of no psychological states, is as a result constituted to the core of elements essentially positioned on a past/present/future scale. In themselves they point at any instant both present-wards and future-wards. It is thus a ‘co-presence’ in the heart of the phenomenon of present and future.

This ineradicable indexically-given ‘co-presence’ of another time in a ‘now’-present is a feature of absolutely all experiences. This is the property which is my special concern. In the above discussion we have seen it relating ‘now’

and the future. But we shall see in what follows that it holds equally of the past. Then since

‘now’ is in the present instant given purely indexically, and the latter property essentially connects and contrasts ‘now’

with its immediate neighbours, any experiencer must be mentally connected to other times as each instant ‘happens’.

Thus, experience brings with it an awareness of the passage of time. This imports an order which is manifest in our capacity to know of our immediately past experience. It is a mark of the fundamental ordering role of time in the inner world.