We are pleased to announce that on Thursday, March 12 at 4.30pm (CET), Thomas Sattig (University of Tuebingen and USI) will give the talk Temporal Consciousness: The Non-Locality Problem as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2026 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.

This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi@usi.ch.

Here is the abstract of the talk:
The non-locality problem concerns the foundations of phenomenal consciousness. The problem consists in the tension between two aspects of human perceptual experiences. First, the local temporal horizon. In our conscious perceptual experiences, the world around us seems to evolve through brief changes on the order of milliseconds to seconds. When asked about the temporal profile of our perceptual experiences, we report that we seem to be “stuck in the present”. Second, the global temporal order. We are usually awake and conscious for minutes to hours. During long streams of consciousness, we experience all processes as having a global temporal order. According to standard order theory, a strict linear temporal order is based on a non-local relation of precedence. But this means that our consciousness lacks a local temporal horizon. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have not yet addressed this problem systematically. In this talk, the problem will be introduced by reference to a precise visual case. Then a solution to the problem will be developed. The solution will part with long-held assumptions in philosophy of time and philosophy of consciousness.