An important upshot of Kant’s definition of epistemicity as functional closure is his conclusion that time is something actively generated by this infolding, rather than passively given. Temporality is an active organisation and ordering of experiences—something that is produced by operations of chronoception.1
Importantly, when comparing global space to rational space, Kant couldn’t help but muse that, although we comprehend the terrestrial ‘magnitude’, we remain ‘ignorant in regard to the objects that this surface might contain’.2 Following his analogy, the same sentiment might well be applied equally to reason and its own ‘grounds of differentiation’. Indeed, exploiting just such a suggestion, Schopenhauer would later assert that ‘[c]onsciousness is the mere surface of our mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior, but only the crust’.3
By invoking an axis of depth, this psychogeological hypothesis also implies a historical or genetic dimension to mind. (It was, as we shall later explore, during Kant’s era that the idea of natural history was truly first consolidating: the idea of nature having a chronology outstripping human experience, one that was, at the time, being first mapped onto Earth’s superposed strata.) Furthermore, given that chronoception is itself a product of mindedness, a corollary implication is that time itself has a history. And indeed, the phylogenesis of time receptivity can be recounted; it is a neural saga that is legible in the ossified memory of the regionalizing and segmenting spine.4 But this story starts not inside (the spine-as-fossil-record), but, far outside, multiple light years away (though the meaning of ‘inside’ and ‘out’ here become progressively more twisted).
Solar flux barrages the earth’s atmosphere with 174 petawatts of radiance,5 creating the stark energy differentia required for the cascading upswell of systems that achieve quasi-stability through unceasing negative regulation—what we call ‘life’.6 Only such constant perturbation affords the budget for such a system to constantly expend its resources to maintain itself: and in continually reproducing itself in this way—in maintaining system invariance and propagation via negative feedback—said system collapses into causal circularity.7 It causes itself to exist, and in so doing becomes more involved in causing itself to exist. This generates, spontaneously, proto-criteria for ‘failure’ or ‘success’ insofar as the system has now ‘defined’ itself by its propensity to stay within a range of acceptable states for self-reproduction and self-propagation. (It begins to act as if it is an end unto itself.) In reaction to environmental perturbation, it pinches itself off into its own spontaneous ‘parameter space’ of regulative function, defined by these proto-criteria for propagative success, and therefore comes to be defined by its tendency to dynamically remain within this state space. And, since negative regulation is also feedforward control, a progressively more ramified responsivity to external stressors—the characteristic which, through the course of evolution, eventually leads to neural blossoming—is also, inevitably, the inward generation of time, the incipience of chronoreceptivity.
The sun, appropriately, is life’s inceptive abiogenetic stressor as well as remaining, to this day, its prime ‘zeitgeber’ (its circadian ‘time-giver’ in the parlance of chronobiologists).8 Provoked by such enveloping hostility, toxicity, and agitation, abiogenetic implosion into functional self-relation allows the living system to better present its own states to itself so as to gain feedforward control over oncoming perturbation. This predictive core constitutive of all living process—highlighted from Maturana to Rosen—is testament to the fact that the organism exists and persists through its exposure, and anticipatory responsivity, to hazard.9 Known in biology as hormesis, the idea is that intermittent exposure to environmental stressors provokes compensatory, adaptive, and beneficial response.10 Stress, whilst provoking the organism to retreat and fall into itself, foments ‘biological robustness’.11 This applies at the cellular and macroevolutionary levels, so that the advent of the CNS can be explained as the phyletic progeny of such propulsive antagonism—because the CNS is nature’s organ of anticipation.12 Crofts refers to this dynamic of environmental perturbations forcing ramifying feedforward responsivity as ‘chronognosis’, arguing that, in a sense, ‘all living organisms are aware of time’. He notes, however, that ‘chronognostic range’ varies with neural intricacy:
With the increasing complexity of metazoans, development of a nervous system, differentiation of organs of sense, and development of the head-tail polarity, and a brain and memory in higher animals, the scope of behavioural complexity also increases, and along with this, the complexity of mechanisms [for] chronognostic range.13
Indeed, at the neurophysiological level, timekeeping is not performed by specialized circuits or dedicated systems,but appears to be a ubiquitous and ‘intrinsic property of neurons’ themselves.14 There is evidence that even the miniscule brains of insects such as bumblebees exhibit an operant, rather than merely circadian, sense of temporal interval.15 Nonetheless, as neural circuity intricates, so too does chronoceptive scope. And this, of course, demands further self-interment.
1. Metzinger: ‘Of course, all physically realized processes of information conduction and processing take time. For this reason, the information available in the nervous system in a certain, very radical sense never is actual information: the simple fact alone that the trans- and conduction velocities of different sensory modules differ leads to the necessity of the system defining elementary ordering thresholds and “windows of simultaneity” for itself. Within such windows of simultaneity it can, for instance, integrate visual and haptic information into a multimodal object representation—an object that we can consciously see and feel at the same time.’ T. Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 25.
2. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 653 [A759/B787].
3. A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 2 vols., 1969), vol. 1, 136.
4. Further expanding Kant’s collocation of the human sensorium and our upright standing upon the planetary mass, gravitational pull has lately been unveiled as itself an important perceptual anchor. Gravity’s terrestrial ubiquity, it is theorized by Lacquaniti et al., allows it to provide the perfect frame of reference for both space and time within our nervous system, a frame which emerges from multisensory cues (visual, vestibular, proprioceptive, interoceptive). Invariant downward pull ‘defines a three-dimensional Cartesian frame’ for space, whilst the ‘gravitational acceleration of falling objects can provide a time-stamp on events, because the motion duration of an object accelerated by gravity over a given path is fixed’. See F. Lacquaniti et al., ‘Gravity in the Brain as a Reference for Space and Time Perception’, Multisensory Research 28:5–6 (2015), 397–426. This leads Jörges and López-Moliner to define gravity-related perceptual processes as a ‘strong prior’ within a Bayesian framework. See B. Jörges and J. López-Moliner, ‘Gravity as a Strong Prior: Implications for Perception and Action’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 11:203 (2017). Swanson has already linked such predictive ‘hyperpriors’ back to Kant’s ‘categories’ and ‘forms of appearance’ as the organizing principles of empirical experience. See L.R. Swanson, ‘The Predictive Processing Paradigm Has Roots in Kant’, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 10:79 (2016). This, then, is how the planetary mass canalizes formal properties of our experiential universe. Moreover, the ‘insuperability’ of such deep calibration (or gravitational ‘ur-framing’) raises interesting problems for space travel and the prospect of life in earth-discrepant gravities. This, in turn, raises further questions concerning the potential variance of alien sensoria and the constraining principles under which any cogito must needs function within our universe. (Dunér and Osvath have dubbed this type of inquiry ‘astrocognition’. See D. Dunér, ‘Astrocognition: Prolegomena to a Future Cognitive History of Exploration’, in U. Landfester, N.-L. Remus, K.-U. Schrogl, and J.-C. Worms [eds.], Humans in Outer Space—Interdisciplinary Perspectives [New York: Springer, 2011], 117–40; and M. Osvath, ‘Astrocognition: A Cognitive Zoology Approach to Potential Universal Principles of Intelligence’, in D. Dunér [ed.], The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life and the Human Mind [Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013], 49–66.) Intelligence will have to overcome such parochial constraints if it is to reach much beyond the tellurian cradle. For the time being, however, we can only speculate upon what extraterrestrial analogues to our own sensorium and motorium may look like. See J.L. Cranford, Astrobiological Neurosystems: Rise and Fall of Intelligent Life Forms in the Universe (New York: Springer, 2014), and N.A. Cabrol, ‘Alien Mindscapes—A Perspective on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’, Astrobiology 16:9 (2016), 661–76.
5. C.J. Rhodes, ‘Solar Energy: Principles and Possibilities’, Science Progress 93 (2010), 37–112.
6. More precisely, they achieve metastability. To paraphrase Wiener, living organisms are metastable Maxwell demons whose stable state is to be dead. N. Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 59.
7. R. Poli, Introduction to Anticipation Studies (New York: Springer, 2017), 18.
8. J. Aschoff, ‘Exogenous and Endogenous Components in Circadian Rhythms’, Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 25 (1960), 11–28.
9. ‘A living system, due to its circular organization […] functions always in a predictive manner’. H.R. Maturana, ‘Biology of Cognition’, in H.R. Maturana and F.J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 26–7. See also R. Rosen, Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations (New York: Springer, 2012).
10. M.P. Mattson, ‘Hormesis Defined’, Ageing Research Review 7:1 (2008), 1–7.
11. H. Kitano, ‘Towards a Theory of Biological Robustness’, Molecular Systems Biology 3:137 (2007).
12. M.P. Mattson, ‘The Fundamental Role of Hormesis in Evolution’, in M.P. Mattson and E.J. Calabrese (eds.), Hormesis: A Revolution in Biology, Toxicology and Medicine (New York: Springer, 2010), 57–68.
13. A.R. Crofts, ‘Life, Information, Entropy, and Time: Vehicles for Semantic Inheritance’, Complexity 13:1 (2007), 14–50: 23–4.
14. D.V. Buonomano and A. Goel, ‘Temporal Interval Learning in Cortical Cultures is Encoded in Intrinsic Network Dynamics’, Neuron 91 (2016), 1-8. Cf. R.B. Ivy and J.E. Schlerf, ‘Dedicated and Intrinsic Models of Time Perception’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12:7 (2008), 273–80.
15. P. Skorupski and L. Chittka, ‘Animal Cognition: An Insect’s Sense of Time?’, Current Biology 16:19 (2006), 851–3. See also A.B. Barron and C. Klein, ‘What Insects Can Tell Us About the Origins of Consciousness’, PNAS 113:18 (2016), 4900–4908. Both articles, inquiring into the insect lifeworld, quote Kant’s views on time as transcendentally presupposed by subjective experience: there may never be a Newton of a blade of grass, but could there be a Kant of dipteran spatiotemporality?