As an alternative to Hebb’s theory, mental life is described in terms of Sherrington’s synapses, habits, and William James’s notion of the stream of thought. The theory accounts for the major organic states, such as waking, sleep, and hypnotic trance; for states of general sensitivity; and for the following aspects of the stream of thought: thought objects with their fringes; acquainting (conce...

William James’ Principles of Psychology, in which he made famous the ‘specious present’ doctrine of temporal experience, and Edmund Husserl’s Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, were giant strides in the philosophical investigation of the temporality of experience. However, an important set of precursors to these works has not been adequately investigated. In this article, we under...

Philosophers have long struggled to understand our perceptual experience of temporal properties such as succession, persistence and change. Indeed, strikingly, a number have felt compelled to deny that we enjoy such experience. Philosophical puzzlement arises as a consequence of assuming that, if one experiences succession or temporal structure at all, then one experiences it at a moment. The t...

We present theoretical analysis and a suite of tests and procedures for addressing a broad class of redundant and misleading association rules we call specious rules. Specious dependencies, also known as spurious, apparent, or illusory associations, refer to a well-known phenomenon where marginal dependencies are merely products of interactions with other variables and disappear when conditione...