Body, Self, and Time: Bud Craig's Global Emotional Moments Theory

The topic of my chapter will be Bud Craig's theory of "global emotional moments" (henceforth the GEMs theory) and the relationship of GEMs to the experience of time. I connect three ideas prominent in Craig's writings: interoception, emotion, and time. Craig held that each GEM has as its neural substrate a large-scale network with the anterior insula cortex (AIC) serving as its central processing hub. This network integrates interoceptive signals that keep track of changes arising in the autonomic nervous system with hedonic and motivational signals based on the organism's sensory perception of its environment. Craig argued that GEMs function as moving windows of time within which "a phenomenal self" is experienced. By the "phenomenal self," I mean a material, embodied self that forms an organism's subjective point of view on the world. Craig proposed what he called a "cinemascopic" theory of GEMs. GEMs are combined over time to form a stream of consciousness, which Craig compared to a movie, with each GEM corresponding to a single snapshot of this movie. I will argue that Craig's cinemascopic theory has implications for our understanding of what I will call the "phenomenal now." There are three main theories of the phenomenal now in the philosophical literature. One point of contention between these theories is whether the phenomenal now has duration or temporal depth. I will argue that GEMs have duration and therefore count against so-called "cinematic" theories of the phenomenal now that take the contents of experience to be of discrete points or instances in time. However, there are different views within philosophy of how the phenomenal now can have duration. I end my chapter by considering how Craig's GEMs theory might bear on this debate.