ActInf GuestStream 068.1 ~ Darius Parvizi-Wayne, "Distrusting the policy"
Channel: Active Inference Institute
Date: 23/01/2024

Distrusting the policy: how inference over action shapes our experience of temporality in flow states and life more broadly
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/b3h2e
Darius Parvizi-Wayne

Time is a remarkably bizarre phenomenon. It is both objectively measurable and subjectively felt, and yet it is fundamentally fleeting, in so far as any attempts to demarcate the present are always tardy. Furthermore, the 'now' seems phenomenologically thick, constituted by the just-past and the about-to-happen in a manner described first by James (1890) and Husserl (2019). Although theoretical accounts of the structure of time-consciousness have begun to proliferate in the active inference framework (cf. Albarracin et al., 2022, 2023; Bogotá, 2023; Bogotá & Djebbaria, 2023), few models exist for the passage of time per se. The most prominent attempt comes from Hohwy et al. (2015), who ground the flow of time in a distrusting of the present hypothesis about the cause of sensory data. In this talk, Darius Parvizi-Wayne argues that a model which roots temporal flows in the dynamics of action policy selection, rather than perceptual inference, is more consonant with the phenomenal nature of the passage of time. This analysis begins with an explication of subjective time in flow states, to which this action-centric model is particularly well-suited, before expanding into a theoretical account of time-consciousness more broadly.

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