Distrusting the policy: how inference over action shapes our experience of temporality in flow states and life more broadly

Abstract

Time is a strikingly bizarre phenomenon. It is both objectively measurable – notwithstanding relativistic effects - 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, few models exist for the passage of time per se. The most prominent attempt comes from Hohwy et al. (2015), who ground the passage of time in a distrusting of the present hypothesis about the cause of sensory data. In this paper, I argue that a model which roots the lived dynamics of temporality in action policy selection, rather than pure perceptual inference, is more consonant with the phenomenal nature of time’s passing. 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 passage phenomenology more broadly.