Featured Papers
Selected papers, with key points and figures.
A selection of papers that shows the character of my work. The thread running through them is a multi-timescale (MTS) framework: time treated not as a single flow but as a stack of interlocking timescales. Starting from Bergson scholarship, the work reaches into cognitive science and AI, the metaphysics of time, and the philosophy of memory — not only interpreting the texts, but building contemporary theory with them.
Figure: Taniguchi et al. 2025, Figure 5 (CC BY 4.0)
System 0/1/2/3: Quad-Process Theory for Multitimescale Embodied Collective Cognitive Systems
Co-authored with Tadahiro Taniguchi and colleagues in AI and robotics
- Cognitive science has long explained thinking with a dual-process model: fast intuition (System 1) and slow deliberation (System 2). This paper adds the bodily and material processes below them (System 0) and the collective, socio-cultural processes above them (System 3), proposing a quad-process theory.
- The theoretical backbone of the extension is the multi-timescale (MTS) interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy of time: the layered structure of durée, redeployed as a design scheme for cognitive systems (Figure 5).
- The payoff is a single picture in which everything from physical behavior through habit and deliberation to norms and institutions appears as the workings of different temporal layers.
- A case of the history of philosophy feeding directly into theory-building in contemporary AI and cognitive science.
Does Time Have a Speed? Time Qualia and Bergson’s Durée
- Philosophy of time has long dismissed the question of time’s own speed as meaningless — time passes at one second per second, which is no rate at all. The paper confronts this verdict head-on.
- It distinguishes measurement (M) and experience (Q) as two operations mapping a shared input into different spaces of discrimination, and formulates the qualitative component of temporal experience, irreducible to measured quantity, as time qualia.
- On this basis, “time passing quickly” turns out to have two senses: the gap between estimated and measured duration (TQTS), and the felt pace of an ongoing flow (FQTS). The latter yields the conclusion that the speed of motion and the speed of time are not two separate things — turning Bergson’s pluralism of durée into a working tool for the contemporary philosophy of time.
Memory as the Origin of the Past: A Developmental and Conceptual Refinement of the Dependency Thesis
- Where does the very idea of the past — yesterday, last year — come from? The dependency thesis says episodic memory is its origin; objections from amnesia cases and the like have kept piling up.
- Instead of defending the thesis as a monolith, the paper decomposes it: the concept of pastness is analyzed as a hybrid of an experiential component and a relational component, and the developmental stages at which each is acquired are teased apart.
- The decomposition shows that the standing counterexamples each target a different component at a different stage, leaving the core of the thesis untouched.
- A contribution to the analytic philosophy of memory, joining conceptual analysis with developmental psychology.