How much time constitutes a conscious experience?

[Magical Realist]

There seems to be some leeway in how large we define a chunk of conscious experience to be. There's certainly a minimal amount of time that something can happen in and we are aware of it. A falling star. A firecracker going off. A bug buzzing our face. That minimal instant of becoming aware of something is measured to be from 300 to 600 milliseconds in length.

But is there a maximal amount of time as well? We seem fine with broadening the window we have on events in our lives. Take 911. That whole event literally took hours and maybe even days to transpire, including television footage and news commentary afterwards about other events and details about what happened. But it was one whole experience we were subjected to, full of shock and dismay and anger and questions about how this could happen.

Reading a book, watching a movie, falling in love, a holiday, working at a job, serving in the military---all these span a time from hours to years, no less understood to be an episode of becoming aware of a situation we had in our lives. Conscious experience seems to have no limits in terms of the amount of time it can happen in. What does this say about consciousness that it can seem to vary so much in terms of its duration?

As we reach our waning years there is a tendency to look back on our whole life as one experience. It is then that we ponder certain philosophical truths and moral lessons, as one learns from any coherent conscious experience. An overarching view which ironically serves us little as we conclude our years of being on this earth.

[C C]

There seems to be some leeway in how large we define a chunk of conscious experience to be. There's certainly a minimal amount of time that something can happen in and we are aware of it. A falling star. A firecracker going off. A bug buzzing our face. That minimal instant of becoming aware of something is measured to be from 300 to 600 milliseconds in length.

But is there a maximal amount of time as well? We seem fine with broadening the window we have on events in our lives. Take 911. That whole event literally took hours and maybe even days to transpire, including television footage and news commentary afterwards about other events and details about what happened. But it was one whole experience we were subjected to, full of shock and dismay and anger and questions about how this could happen.

Reading a book, watching a movie, falling in love, a holiday, working at a job, serving in the military---all these span a time from hours to years, no less understood to be an episode of becoming aware of a situation we had in our lives. Conscious experience seems to have no limits in terms of the amount of time it can happen in. What does this say about consciousness that it can seem to vary so much in terms of its duration?

As we reach our waning years there is a tendency to look back on our whole life as one experience. It is then that we ponder certain philosophical truths and moral lessons, as one learns from any coherent conscious experience. An overarching view which ironically serves us little as we conclude our years of being on this earth.

I supposed being doped-up on opium -- or whatever substances slow down thoughts (and awareness of change) -- would certainly stretch out a single cognitive moment to several minutes or more worth of occurrences in the environment. But that would just cause our "grand narrative" that we've accumulated about ourselves to take vastly longer than ever to process.

The general understanding of one's life (and the memories underlying it) could be represented by a single abstract concept -- but one that would accordingly be stripped of particular details. Otherwise, a reflection or formulaic take about "personal history" still has to be chopped-up and unfold over a multitude of microsecond increments.

The brain apparently has no four dimensional configuration devoted to meticulously apprehending and experiencing every event from birth to death in one snapshot of knowledge and presentation. The "entire 4D worm" of ourselves is instead dissected into chunk sequences of distinct brain states that are confined to their solitary islands of information. Past islands can be included as part of the latter package, as well as anticipations slash speculations about future ones -- but neither of those is "real" like the immediate island or current interval of cognition, which is always a solipsist with respect to the status of the others ("I'm the only unit of cognition that exists!").

Thanks to memory being replicated in each island, there's also a feeling of continuity. Despite the five-year-old child of decades ago having a different body and being significantly psychologically different from who we are now, we can still identify with that individual thanks to the information retention: "That was me!"

Reincarnation would be feasible if memory transference could truly occur, because in a sense it's happening all the time in the context of everyday continuity. But because current-day Janet Grisham can't remember that she was William Detch back in the 15th-century, there is just no valid connection there. It's utter fantasy without the legit memories (not the make-believe memories of Shirley MacLaine's past lives -- at least as those are popularly classified).

Ray Pritchard: "Shirley MacLaine says she was once a Buddhist monk, a court jester to King Louis XIV, a Moorish girl who lived along The Camino in northern Spain, and a mistress to Charlemagne. She also believes her daughter was once her mother in a previous life."