Materialism › Neurobiological
Dalla Barba's Temporal Consciousness
Consciousness as Personal Temporality
Gianfranco Dalla Barba argues that remembering is a mode of consciousness, not the retrieval of stored traces. Temporal Consciousness presents objects and events as uniquely mine and placed in my personal past, present or future, while Knowing Consciousness presents general, impersonal knowledge; he proposes the hippocampus as the neural correlate of Temporal Consciousness and tests the theory against amnesia and confabulation.
Gianfranco Dalla Barba, Marie-Françoise Boissé, Valentina La Corte
What consciousness is
Episodic remembering, present orientation and future projection are one first-person mode of consciousness, Temporal Consciousness, which confers pastness and uniqueness on brain modifications that are in themselves atemporal.
Mind and body
Modes of consciousness interact with patterns of brain modification and have neural correlates (the hippocampus for Temporal Consciousness), but the modes are irreducible to one another and to the traces themselves.
Mechanism
The hippocampus temporalizes otherwise atemporal cortical modifications, so that content is experienced as a unique episode in one's own past, present or future.
Core claims
- Complete bilateral hippocampal damage abolishes Temporal Consciousness while semantic knowledge, personal facts and chronological time survive.
- Confabulators retain partial hippocampal integrity, and their Temporal Consciousness malfunctions rather than disappears.
- Confabulators, unlike non-confabulating amnesics, judge items seen four times as seen once, mistaking multiplicity for uniqueness.
- Confabulation extends across personal past, present and future alike, as a single temporal mode predicts.
Criticisms
Craver and colleagues called the construct ambiguous because amnesic patients keep much temporal competence; Dalla Barba and La Corte assigned those abilities to Knowing Consciousness and conceded earlier formulations were imprecise. The irreducibility of Temporal Consciousness is asserted on phenomenological grounds, so critics can redescribe the data in representational terms.
Implications
- Survival beyond death: Unlikely
- Since Temporal Consciousness depends on the hippocampus and is lost when it is destroyed, it would not survive the brain.
Related theories
- Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology (Influence)
- Brentano’s Intentionality and Self-Awareness (Influence)
- Gurwitsch’s Structured Field of Experience (Overlap)
- McComas's Hippocampal Memory-Stream Theory (Overlap)
Sources
- Memory, Consciousness and Temporality, Gianfranco Dalla Barba (2002)
- Beyond the memory trace paradox and the fallacy of the homunculus, Gianfranco Dalla Barba (2001)
- Temporal consciousness and confabulation: Escape from unconscious explanatory idols, Gianfranco Dalla Barba (2009)
- Temporal consciousness and confabulation: Is the medial temporal lobe temporal?, Gianfranco Dalla Barba and Marie-Françoise Boissé (2010)
- The hippocampus, a time machine that makes errors, Gianfranco Dalla Barba and Valentina La Corte (2013)
- A neurophenomenological model for the role of the hippocampus in temporal consciousness, Gianfranco Dalla Barba and Valentina La Corte (2015)
- Confabulators mistake multiplicity for uniqueness, M. Serra, V. La Corte, R. Migliaccio et al. (2014)
- Individuals with episodic amnesia are not stuck in time, C. F. Craver, D. Kwan, C. Steindam and R. S. Rosenbaum (2014)