Tag Archives: reality

by

Magellanism

authentic artistic productions
the avant garde…
whisper unconscious koens
subliminal social suggestions
haunting the ready, the restless…
prepares ground
for punctuated emergence

what is this light ???
a cascading series
of erotic creative toggles
which vitalize the preparation
of this special autopoesis
the poetry of our collective dance
becomes obvious
in these special glimpses
of the great remembering

it’s more than the eros
of pursuing the excellent questions,
the loving play and design
of cognitive gifts and exercise…
it’s more than the sacred reverence
of our sanga in practice,
this emergent suchness,
exhibiting delicious blended elements
of both…
ah !!

at this intersection of our experience
a fresh, new, and alive we-ness emerges
mysterious, gorgeous, seductive presentations
the stuff of this new manifestation
the resonance of our fresh social moment
this precious group
this shared new luminance
new containers are formed
already brimming,
with our splendid light

by

PAL. Chapter 22. The Illusory and the Real. pp.579-602

 

The thought-objects of perception which are presupposed in the common thought of civilised beings, are almost wholly hypothetical. The material universe is largely a concept of the imagination which rests on a slender basis of direct sense-perception. – Whitehead (1932)

All experience has an illusory quality, from a vision of the starry firmament to mathematical objects at the smallest scale. Yet the illusory or phenomenal nature of experience, which is at the heart of many great philosophical systems, escapes the minds of most ordinary people, who live their lives as if the self and world are fully real and material.

Illusion is an endogenous image that carries with it features of a terminal cognition. It appears to be an alteration in an external object because the image is close to full objectification.

Hallucination and illusion are incomplete perceptions, while a perception is a fully exteriorised hallucination, guided by sensory constraints. Admittedly this is an exceptional view of the world. It is not surprising that those who see the world in this way, i.e. as an extension of the mind, are tempted to look for another, more dependable image of the real, such as that of physics or the absolute, or a noumenal world beyond experience.

Illusions are not limited to those we perceive and study, but are found in all aspects of daily life. They include such fictions as object stability in a world of flux, time as linear rather than recurrent, change as an external relation between objects rather than intrinsic to the object formation and being as thing-like rather than a category that enfolds a becoming. On these foundations, the whole edifice of mind develops, and with it, the gap from self to world, the emergence of the present moment and, around it, past and future, and the feeling of intention and desire.

… it takes only a little insight in a spell of vertigo, when the world spins around one’s head, to remind us of the subjectivity of all so-called veridical perceptions.

The partition of experience into subject and object is an important fiction but not the most fundamental. That of substance is deeper, more pervasive and responsible for the illusion of subject and object. The subjective phase of thought lays down the self and its will, the objective phase lays down concrete actualities. The progression to definiteness is an aim to stability. The shift in quality in a progressive individuation is the basis for the division of experience into self and object.

If substance is primary, change is unreal, if relations are primary, substance is illusory. … The distinction of substance and process, or being and becoming, dissolves when substance is conceived as being-as-the-category-of-becoming, and becoming is conceived as process over a temporal extensibility that is framed by a category, and category is conceived as a duration of relations, the awareness of which is obscured for the sake of stability. … The mind chunks experience (Miller, 1956) into things, selves, ideas, propositions, the perceptual and logical solids that articulate and anchor the “all is in flux”.

(emphasis mine)

Reality is different than existence. The concept of reality presumes a match from mind to world. The concept of existence is independent of verification. The non-existent cannot be real, while a thing must first exist in order to be real, so that reality presumes existence.

The truth is in the relation not in the relata.

An acknowledgement of the ambiguity or uncertainty of truth is the first step in their honest pursuit. In fact, ambiguity may inhere in the truth if the dialectic employed in its discovery extends into the truth that is discovered.

The interdependence of all things, and the dependencies within all things, remind us that we are sets of constitutive relations embedded in still larger sets. There is an implication of such observations for moral philosophy, in that the artificiality, tentativeness and transience of autonomy speak against egoism and isolation, and provides a meta-physics that reinforces an ethics of generosity, shared experience and the primacy of community.

(emphasis mine)

… the gradient from doubt to conviction, or from an awareness of a falsehood to certainty in an error is determined not by a relation to fact but by the experiential quality of the object. Coherence, not correspondence is the psychological determinant of belief.

The distinction of the real and the unreal rests on a confusion of categories. It may be a confusion we have to live with, but at least it should be acknowledged.

… real things are hardly what they seem, not because they are misperceived, or because they are shadows or phantoms, but because what we observe, and what we infer behind our observations, are entities modelled on our experience with inner states that are opposed to external events, when the external is not the real world but the final segment of the mind/brain state that objectifies as “reality”.

The duration of the present, the unity of the self, the subject/predicate relation in language, and so on, create illusions that can only be exposed by the most ruthless and uncompromising skepticism.

The real is a covert process of creation that we mirror as spectators or participants. It is not that objects are unreal but that the real in objects is missed and, with it, the groundlessness, i.e. emptiness in the Buddhist sense, of all claims, all entities and all objects of desire.

The distinction of the illusory and the real depends on whether the intrinsic relationality of an object is part of its description. The consequences of a failure to address the dual aspect of objects and of accepting the phenomenal as real, whether in the abrupt sacrifice of a life for the sake of an important belief of the gradual pursuit of a trivial one, is life as if appearances matter. That is not to say that the appearances do not matter, for an object can matter whether or not it is real.

An object is a combination of category and process.

The real lies in the knowledge that all objects consist of a simultaneous being and becoming.

We live with being and becoming, the insubstantiality of process and appearance, the intangibility of relations and categories, yet we must also live as if the categories are necessary and real.

… if all things develop out of value, any attack on intrinsic value is a perversion. Thus the enlightened soul does not seek to import or extend value into the world, but rather, apprehends and strives to enhance a world that is literally shimmering with value in all its objects.

(emphasis mine)

by

PAL. Chapter 18. Efficacy and Illusions. Pp 486-508.

 

Choice is a fork in the road of value that gives direction to agency and intention. The feeling of agency is value flowing from the self into action.

Actions go out to the world from the self as occasions of will or desire. Objects and events come to the self as occasions of interest or accident.

… a deeper understanding of freedom, choice and efficacy entails a radical re-thinking of the perceptual process, no less than that of action, since the feeling of agency is largely perceptual.

Agency and choice come to the fore in action, especially in verbal imagery (inner speech), as an accentuation of penultimate phases in the language act. This experience is central to the feeling of conscious choice, intention and desire.

In perception and action, there is a progressive analysis of character (self) to choice (selection), decision (specification) and effectuation.

… the concept of god’s agency is derived from the feeling of human intention, as the perception (theory) of object causation is derived from the feeling of agent causation.

The transition from potential to actual is causal if it is divisible into intervening phases, but this does not apply if potential and actual are part of – as stem to leaf – the same entity. Potential perishes at the moment of actuality, not successively at each phase in the path to the actual, since potential at each phase is part of the actuality it leads to, i.e. part of the epoch of its actualisation. Potential and actual are successive phases in a single momentary existence.

The origin of agency in early cognition is also the beginning of a theory of subjective time.

The control of the object that is the seed of agency is less a projection of human thought onto nature than an elaboration of indeterminateness in natural process.

The argument that advanced forms exist in earlier ones in statu nascendi is also the critique of an evolutionary account of consciousness and value. Purposefulness achieves its aim when it terminates. The aim is not given beforehand.

Agency in organism is the basis of a theory of object-causation. Intentionality in organism, as nature individuates still further into human thought.

The distinction of cause and effect in object-causation is parallel to the distinction of self and world in agent-causation. In the former, such problems as the demarcation of the cause, its transition to the effect or the attribution of contingency to accidental causation resist analysis by the methods of the very theory they subtend. Since they cannot be explained by the doctrine of external relations, they vitiate the theory. A theory that cannot explain its core assumptions is vacuous, not merely incomplete. A persistent incoherence is close to an unacknowledged refutation. Similar problems bedevil agent-causation, but here, contingency translates to free will and the connection of cause to effect is even more obscure.

The experience of direct knowledge of our inner states is in striking contrast to the indirect knowledge of ignorance that we have of the series of co-temporal states of the world and other minds. The immediacy of awareness for our won thoughts does not occur for the internal states of other objects or the thoughts of others, unless one accepts the possibility of mental telepathy. (emphasis mine) The conscious anticipation of a coming state and the feeling of agency and intention contribute to the continuity from one state to the next.

The other side of a lack of direct knowledge of processes linking the succession of states in the world is the inference of lawfulness in physical passage, whether due to probabilities, causal necessity or divine guidance. Since ordinary objects do not contain selves that can intercede in the flow of world events, they are inferred to be the outcomes of a causal series that, in principle, traces back to the beginnings of the universe. … For example, we tend to postulate hidden causes (motivations, conflicts, etc.) to explain the actions of others, which they believe are freely chosen.

While the presence of choice in nature is consistent with some interpretations of process metaphysics, the feeling of choice in nature is sensed primarily in the “primitive” thought of animism and dream cognition. The uncertainty in quantum theory is ordinarily interpreted not in terms of choice but of probabilities which collapse, retroactively, into causal effects. If mental causation (agency) is impressed on the order of natural events as object causation, free will might extend into the world as choice, either as contingency or in the belief that god intervenes in the stream (cycle) of change. In any event, our concepts of objective change have their sources in physical experience.

In sum, freedom in non-cognitive nature, as well as in the brain state, is grounded in contingency or probability or creative advance, yet the concept of object causation is inherited from human agency, just as the concept of probability is inherited form human choice. The potential, the novelty and the possibility are so forceful an experience with an image in the mind survive in the contingency of external objects. The feeling of volition that is lost as the object exteriorises is replaced by the feeling of a causal force that is extrinsic to the observer. The will exteriorises with the object as its causal power. The free will that imposes certainty on indecision becomes the power of causation tha imposes necessity on contingency.

I think the causal theory of nature is a strong extension of the feeling of agent causation to external objects, while contingency in nature is a weak extension to objects of the feeling of choice, possibility and personal freedom. There is a complementary relation between, on the one hand, the rigid laws of macrophysics and the uncertainties at the quantum level with, on the other, the certainty of agent-causation and the freedom – creativity, uncertainty etc. – of personal action. … The “laws” of the mind that give the objects of perception (and science) become the physical laws that govern mind independent entities as well as mind.

(emphasis mine)

The sense of self as persistent over time is the result of a positive illusion of a prolongation of its arising and a negative illusion of a lack of incessant perishing. The replication of the arising over the perishing of each moment swamps the perishing and accentuated event recurrence, transforming events into objects, while the obscuration of the perishings by the new arisings accounts for the hardening of objects into substances that appear permanent. The stability of the self mirrors the illusion of a dynamic will, as stability and flux achieve a compromise of permanence and relationality, or inflexibility and change. The will cuts across the perceptual boundary of mind and world.

An object cannot be what it becomes until it becomes what it is, but it cannot become what it is until it is already that object (category). Creativity is the realisation of what in some sense one already knows, as contingency is the realisation of what is not known until it is realised. The juxtaposition of the agency of self-realisation with the contingency of perception extends the novelty of basic entities to the freedom of the will, and extends the freedom of the will to possibility in the world.

To say, I am the other, is literally true.

Reality is given by a conspiracy of the senses, as scientific objectivity is given by a consensus of opinion, not by the intrinsic properties of what is perceived.

(emphasis mine)

Action, especially altruistic action is neutralised by objectivity, as decision, however rational, is not decided by reason.

Self and act are one state.

Reality is the process of individuation, the transformation of wholes-to-parts, and the categories that turn such transformations into stable forms.

The belief in one world of private experience and another of public events is deeply entrenched. To think otherwise borders on mysticism, to feel otherwise is psychosis. The “gap” from mind to world is fundamental to the entire edifice of western thought. Yet the assumed confrontation of the self with objects that are, in fact, tributaries of the observers mind is an error only slightly less pernicious than the separation of mind from physical nature.

The creative would seem to be the “highest” expression of free will, as habit and repetition are its nadir. But the creative is not a product of the self, for the self is recreated with its contents. Process is creative at every phase.

by

PAL. Chapter 8. Actualization and Causality. pp.219-241

We have disputes over zombies and humans, computers and brains, silicon chips and carbon molecules, which for many are debates over whether consciousness and qualia are to be given privileged status in the description of mental states.

Causal theory saps purpose from behaviour and displaces signification from individuals to actions in the world. Perspectival theory turns the self into an image for others. We are left with a nexus of causal relations or a phantom that eludes description. And we ask, still, what is an individual?

In process theory, the mind/brain state is a single complex object. Representations or symptoms are the fleeting actualities of process, not mental things that interact. Mental contents are finalities that ‘contain’ their momentary histories, not causal objects the project on future effects. The continuum from potential to actual within a single mind/brain state is the direction of its internal relatedness. Change involves relations constituting the object, not its interaction with other objects.

There is no chain of cause and effect, but a continuous wave-like transition. Mental events or contents in the mental state deposit and are replaced, they do not cause other events to occur. Objects are reinstated by change, in a transition from potential to actual that recurs. … The replaced state is the ground (?cause) over which the replacing state is deposited (?effect). Each state unfolds over the immediately preceding one.

… the feeling, meaning and recognition of an object are not attached to things out there in the world after they are perceived, in a second-pass process that follows perception, but are phases ingredient in the same process through which the perception occurs.

(emphasis mine)

… the approach undermines the realism, consensual validation and objectivity of a descriptive science of the mind.

Actualities are the concrete particulars that populate consciousness and the perceptual field. Everything we are aware of is already a particular, even those concepts that are vague and still-forming in our consciousness. A mood, a feeling, an inclination, are perhaps not yet particulars, but once the content is settled, even if it is unresolved, its actualisation is complete.

… actualities are not resultants or ingredients, but segments that objectify a continuum of becoming, which extends form a core of potential to the objects of reality. We describe actualities at the expense of their becoming, even as they perish in our description, and we describe potential as what is left over after what can be specified is exhausted, but potential, because it is devoid of content, is more difficult to grasp. Potential cannot be described in terms of the definiteness that is its aim, nor the indefiniteness that is its warrant, yet because there are limits on what issues from a potential, it is neither homogeneous nor undifferentiated.

Consider the problem of potentiality from the standpoint of the arousal of a word or object in the mind. There is great difficulty in describing the meaning of a word prior to the attainment of a phonological shape, or in describing and object-concept prior t its individuation as an image in the mind or an object in the world.

In my opinion, the final word or object is deposited through a qualitative transformation from depth to surface. In this transform, the anticipatory lexical- or object-concept is not identical to the final word or object. The pre-object fails to achieve the same degree of referential or denotational specificity. In arises out of syncretic, magical and metaphorical thought, and develops towards referential adequacy.

The process of fact-creation from felt-meaning is the source of value, …

The transition from potential to actual is continuous. Every phase except the final one, and perhaps even that, has potential for another transformation.

… imagination is the foundation out of which the perception of ‘reality’ develops. Within every perception there is a buried system of dreamwork, and magical and paralogical modes of thought.

Since the world sets limits on the actualisation process, the self is as much a creation of the world, i.e. the constraints of sensation, as the latter is a creation of the self, i.e. a perceptual realisation. To have a self is to have objects to perceive.

Character is the source of the conscious contents of our mind, but not their cause. The relation of character to action is that of potential to actual, not cause and effect. The action individuates through a qualitative sequence that is constrained by the elimination of maladaptive possibilities. Character does not cause or produce a behaviour, no more than the root of a flower causes the petals, but it is ingredient as an anticipatory phase in a dynamic structure. An action is a sign of character, not its product, as a thought is not the output of a thinker but a kind of signature of his feelings and intelligence.

The strength of the feeling of agency is a symptom of the depth of the thought, not a result of the effort applied by the subject to the thought-content, and should not be taken as psychological evidence for agent-causation.

In process theory, acts and agents are realised and revived. The antecedent does not cause the consequent, but is transformed in to it in a qualitative series of whole-part shifts. The seed becomes the flower, it does not cause it. The child does not cause an adult, but becomes one.

The feeling of “agent causation” that underwrites responsibility is a powerful but necessary deception, explicable in terms of the microstructure of the mind/brain state. The feeling of agency probably develops when a child reaches for something.

Conflict is inevitable since every entity is a contrast.

… conflict is not a matter of energy flow, or the interaction of ideas and feelings; rather, in the form of contrast, dialectic or individuation, it is a pervasive and intrinsic feature at all phases in the cognitive process, whether the evolutionary struggle of pre-human organisms or in the specification of phonological features and object form in language and perception.

However the source of the conflict is not in the actions of the other, but in the self’s own object concepts, the affective tonality of which is below the threshold of consciousness.

The action development is the implementation of will, and generates a feeling of agency that is essential to self-preservation and egoistic action. In sum, perception is linked to the realisation of the other, action is the mode of self-realisation. Of course, these are not sharply demarcated, rather they are biases established early in life and derived from evolutionary trends in animal cognition. Yet they determine the relative locus and emphasis of other and self-directed feeling, as the self-concept is articulated by value.

Ultimately, the unity of the world is binding of objects in consciousness, the coherence of concurrent lines of development, and the growth of the world out of the self in the momentary history of all individualities.

Authenticity is not an extrinsic judgement, as with right and wrong, where there is adherence to some convention, or deviance from a standard or rule. It is, for better or worse, self-realisation in conduct.

Agency is not an output of a self that stands behind an action and urges it forward; rather, the feeling of volition is created as a kind of byproduct of an act- and object-realisation.

by

PAL Foreword,Preface, Introduction pp.0-46

Foreword;

This new book by Jason Brown, who over the last several decades has woven the somewhat unlikely strands of process metaphysics and clinical neurology into a magnificent theoretical tapestry, represents an attempt to include moral thinking within the framework of the theory. The importance of this move should not be overlooked.

How should our beliefs shape our behaviour?

It is a “unified field theory”, rooted in the abstract metaphysics of process philosophy on the one hand, and the messy reality of the neurology clinic on the other, potentially transforming how we look at phenomena as apparently disparate as the nature of time, the origins of dreams ans hallucinations, the way a speech act unfolds, and (now with the present volume) how we make value judgements.

For whom, then, has this book been written? Clinicians are likely to be baffled by the metaphysics; philosophers, by the clinical material; Psychologists and neuropsychologists, by the lack of empirical tests and statistical analysis. Almost all of us will find our resources of knowledge challenged, if not simply inadequate, at one point or another in the reading of Jason Brown’s work. Many faint hearted readers are likely to say, “Well this book seems to have been written for someone else, not for me!”

Brown cannot be rightly accused of oversimplifying or pandering to the needs of a mass audience looking for simple solutions to complex problems. On the contrary, the theoretical edifice here is enormously complex, indeed incomprehensible for those with intellectual blinders firmly in place. There are no slogans here that can be used to stop arguments, but rather a series of insights that constrain our thinking in a different and more productive way than previously. This is of course sometimes a painful process.

Author’s Preface;

Only when a philosophy is at full bloom do we appreciate the intuition that generated it. The early stages of a philosophy is one of groping, confusion, inarticulateness, and enthusiasm. ~ George Adams, 1930.

The clinical and neurological data are the material of the philosophy, while the philosophy is the ground on which the seeds of the psychology can be planted. In my view, a philosophy not based on phenomenal experience is stranded in speculative argumentation, while a psychology not grounded in philosophy or biology will be mired in trivia or romantic fiction. Yet I would agree with the comment of William James that a scientific understanding of the mind/brain will necessarily be metaphysical.

Introduction;

To each she appears in a unique form. She hides amid a thousand names and terms and is always the same. ~ Goethe, On Nature.

Is speciation in the process of evolution analogous to a specification in an act of cognition? Is the process through which species are formed related in some way to the struggle and adaptation that every entity goes through in order to become what it is at any given moment? The realisation of an organism, or any object, is an intrinsic microtemporal process that is largely imperceptible. Does this process correspond with the putative extrinsic relations involved in the reproduction of organisms viewed from the standpoint of populations and evolutionary time? If so, we could say that the evolutionary process of survival and diversification is the outer, large scale, or macroscopic expression of an inner, small scale microscopic process of self-realisation.

The transformation of potential to actual is like that of a not-yet-existent ground to a developing figure in which the ground is the antecedent whole or potential for realisation and the figure is what is actually being realised out of the whole. Once the whole is realised, the being becomes and existent. This process is uniform in nature. The same pattern that creates a brain, brings a particle into existence. (emphasis mine) We should not be surprised that what is most profound in nature is what is most universal, and thus imperceptible owing to it’s uniformity.

One could say that the complexity fills the duration as it expends. This implies that the increasing complexity that eventuates in the human brain is not an explanation of value or consciousness, but is a product of the process leading to it. This process is a kind of growth. This is also true for the transformation of societies, in which change occurs less by revolution or coercion than by slow assimilation, This is also a form of growth, taking place through an increase in the intrinsic complexity of society, viewed as an organism rather than a collection or compilation of entities.

The relation of a duration to it’s contents is not that of a container to the things it contains, but rather that of a virtual whole to virtual parts. In a particle, the whole and part are envelope and wave form; in the mind, they are the mental state and it’s phase transitions. A self, an idea, an object, are recurring sets of covert, sequential phases that unfold over a cycle of existence.

…a becoming creates time (change) as serial parts individuate out of simultaneous wholes. … The relation of category and process, or whole and part to being and becoming is the “deep structure” of the process of evolution.

An entity becomes what it is and so defines itself as it occurs, whether a society in relation to all humanity, or an atom against the void. Every motion is an orientation, every orientation a discrimination, every discrimination a valuation. Existence is the initial value.

Facts or values arise in a context of self-realisation. (emphasis mine)

States of affairs begin as intuitions, then personal beliefs permeated by values, and grow into experiential or scientific facts. The intense value of a fact to one who experiences or discovers it may be of only mild value to someone else. The fact is still a value though it is shorn of personal feelings. Gradually, the affective tonality of a fact becomes so distilled that it seems value free. Scientific facts are like this. Science ignores value in the pursuit of present fact, but in so doing, it also ignores the past that forms much of present desire. We intuit the affective valance in the personal history of novel facts before they wither in habit and consensus , in the passionate intensity of those who argue for their truth. The ferocity of argumentation over seemingly neutral facts is often surprising in those we assume to be detached and reasonable, such as scientists and philosophers.

… The categorical primes that underlie cognition are infused from the very outset with drive energy. Idea and feeling, concept and process, are dual aspects at each phase.

For some, the self is a social construct. Is value a magnet or an impulse? Are customs and obligations determinants of behaviour, sources of instilled values, or bases for moral judgement? Conduct in accordance with the law can arise as personal value, an obligation that is apprehended as partly external, or one that is fully coercive.

This world enriches the self through experience and learning, not by filling a naïve brain with ‘information’, but by fractionating innate categories into sub-sets of knowledge, belief and value.

If one can set aside the traditional assumption that perception occurs through the passive reception and construction of sensory data that are generated outside the perceiver and become ingredient in the mind, many aspects of the theory expounded here will begin to make sense.

The main point here, and the starting point for almost everything that follows, is that fully objective experiences are also subjective, in that they too emanate from the subject’s own beliefs and values. … Subjectivity applies not only to pains, after-images and other qualia, but to all perceptual experience.

The theory expounded in this book is a blend of idealism and naturalism that attempts to resolve the objectivity of ethical strictures in a monist theory of process.

… the existence of the other is, ultimately, an hypothesis about the origins of a perception, just as a perception or a concept is a hypothesis about the entities it models or represents. It is my belief that the problem of subjectivism, far from being obstacles to a theory of subject-object relations, are the key to understanding the nature of value, compassion, and the ‘place’ of the other in the matrix of the self.

With it’s awareness of a no-longer-existing past and a not-yet-existing future, the mind seems fully distinct from physical nature.

Subjectivism, or the “view from inside”, claims we can only know our own ideas. This is not consistent with the hypothesis that each mind realises a portion of the wholeness of universal mind or, put differently, actualises some portion of natural process. In a monist theory of process, a mind is conceived as a duration within a wider category of feeling. Every entity, including a mind, is a local manifestation of the ground of nature or physical reality.

The outcome of this inquiry has been fro me, and I hope it will be for the reader as well, a deeper appreciation of the place of the other in the ‘structure’ of the self’s own valuations.

From an external or objective standpoint, then, moral conduct tends to be judged in terms of what is reasonable or fair, or what conforms to social norms, not in terms of a paradigm of saintly or altruistic behaviour, or what might be considered perfection. … Even charity and hospitality are values that are usually not obligatory, at least not in the West.

For the state, the ideal requires a willingness to transcend national interests for the sake of a globel or transnational perspective, according to which the state pursues the common good, not just that of it’s own citizens.

The higher morality of the individual is centred in the community, not the self, but it is not the community that engages the ideal, it is the individual, or group of like-minded individuals. We can say that the claims of the other should be prior to the claims of the self, as the claims of humanity as a whole should be prior to those of the state, but it is the subjective character of the individual to which all claims of morality must be submitted for judgement.

Time is a critical dimension in moral decision and judgement. This appears in the opposition between automatic or impulsive action and action that is reasoned and deliberate. One occurs in the immediate present, the other involves future considerations. … The more immediate the action, the more it is judged as a sign of character: for example, spontaneous altruism is a mark of virtue precisely because there was apparently not time to make a rational calculation of future benefit.

… we consider the good person to be someone who acts in a good way instinctively, while we consider a good leader or state to be one that acts with caution and deliberation. … Here, the essential point is the importation of time into moral theory.