The mind-body problem addresses one of the fundamental questions of science and humanity. How is consciousness related to the body and brain? How is subjective experience connected with the material world?
Consciousness is associated with the brain. There is no doubt about that. But how exactly the two relate is not understood. This is the mystery of consciousness: how does experience, which does not seem to be tangible from a scientific viewpoint, fit into the grand scheme of the objective world?
In a 2021 article by my Australian colleague Lachlan Kent and myself, we emphasized this under-represented aspect in the debate: time consciousness. Consciousness and the felt present moment extend in time and can be described as a continuous flow of events in a felt present moment.
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The question of how we perceive time is fundamental to understanding temporally extended consciousness. I wrote about attempts to measure extended consciousness in a recent Psychology Today blog. Any theory of consciousness must necessarily include time consciousness, and only then can it explain how the brain achieves this feat at the level of the brain.
Lachlan Kent’s and my analysis in the paper (2021) suggested that most leading theories cannot explain continuity or flow within an extended conscious experience because they are constrained to discrete, nonconscious functional moments without extension.
