Physics of the Human Temporality: Complex Present

Springer, 2021.

Lubashevsky I., Plavinska N.

This book presents a novel account of the human temporal dimension called the “human temporality” and develops a special mathematical formalism for describing such an object as the human mind. One of the characteristic features of the human mind is its temporal extent. For objects of physical reality, only the present exists, which may be conceived as a point-like moment in time. In the human temporality, the past retained in the memory, the imaginary future, and the present coexist and are closely intertwined and impact one another.

This book focuses on one of the fragments of the human temporality called the complex present. A detailed analysis of the classical and modern concepts has enabled the authors to put forward the idea of the multi-component structure of the present.  For the concept of the complex present, the authors proposed a novel account that involves a qualitative description and a special mathematical formalism. This formalism takes into account human goal-oriented behavior and uncertainty in human perception.

The present book can be interesting for theoreticians, physicists dealing with modeling systems where the human factor plays a crucial role, philosophers who are interested in applying philosophical concepts to constructing mathematical models, and psychologists whose research is related to modeling mental processes.

Keywords: phenomenology, phenomenal consciousness, emergence, speed-accuracy tradeoff, two-component description, space-time cloud, Human mind, two-dimensional time, human temporality, complex present, connected past, connected future, specious present, experiential now, synchronic units, diachronic unit, tripartite structure, mental effort, sense of agency, sense of ownership, access consciousness, phenomenological self, mind-in-the-self, body-in-the-self, atomism and extensionalism, goal-oriented behavior, action strategy, action point, action-strategy Lagrangian, systems with higher-order time-derivatives, Ostrogradsky's formalism, action-strategy Hamiltonian, manifold of optimal action strategies, 2D-time dynamics, action strategy space-time cloud, dynamics of space-time clouds in Hilbert space