mohsen bashiri

This paper delves into the concept of continuity of consciousness, differentiating between three aspects of consciousness: State, content, and stream of consciousness. The paper debates two main senses of continuity: moderate continuity, requiring no gaps in the flow, and strong continuity, demanding a phenomenal connection between each experiential phase. The present study argues against strong continuity due to limitations of introspection and evidence like saccadic suppression, where the visual process is suppressed during rapid eye movements. To compare different models of temporal experiences in explaining the continuity of the stream of consciousness, this research briefly examines the issue of temporal experiences. It focuses on the direct and immediate perceptual experience of properties and relationships that are extended in time. Two opposing models have been presented: The snapshot model suggests we experience the world in static snapshots and infer succession and order later, while the specious present models propose a direct experience of temporally extended properties and ralations. The paper focuses on the “specious present”, a brief period where we can perceive non-simultaneous events as unified. Two models explain its structure: The retentional model suggests temporally extended contents represented by a short-lived experience. In contrast, content’s temporal structure matches the experience’s temporal structure. According to Dainton, the overlap model effectively explains the perceived continuity of the stream based on co-consciousness and overlapping experiential parts. It is argued that his model wrongly assumes strong continuity, and even if his assumption is valid, his conclusion is controversial. Finally, only from the point of view of the continuity of consciousness are the models of temporal experiences equal in their explanation.

This paper delves into the ontological nature of perceptual experiences, seeking to categorize them within a metaphysical framework. Contrary to the orthodox debates about the content and phenomenal character of experiences this discussion examines their underlying nature as belonging to ontological categories. The common perspective considers perceptual experiences as mental events whose content represents the world. Despite this, the question remains whether these experiences can be ontologically classified as events. At first, this paper accounts for Alex Byrne's view, which disputes reasons based on ordinary language and introspection for classifying perceptual experiences as events. Byrne then compares perceptual experiences to propositional attitudes and beliefs, suggesting an alternative view. Thus, experiences are not events at all but rather states that, like beliefs, relate the subject to content. It appears that Byrne, by proposing this, firstly acknowledges the ontological distinction between states and events and secondly, gives precedence to the notion of perceptual experiences as states. By examining the temporal structures of phenomena (temporal shape), I address whether the distinction between different categories, including events and states, is ontological or merely different ways of expressing our descriptions of phenomena in language. Through discussions on the issue of the persistence of physical objects, I ultimately conclude that determination at the moment can serve as a good criterion for distinguishing the two categories of state/event. Finally, I will argue that experiential properties are dynamic, and their instantiation by the subject places perceptual experiences in the category of occurrents, specifically events.

Performability is an important parameter in safety-critical real-time systems. This parameter is defined as the joint consideration of two other important parameters, i.e., reliability and performance. This paper proposes a schedulability condition, which guarantees a desired level of performability in various working conditions, for real-time systems. The basic idea underlining this condition is to select a subset of schedulable tasks and manage their slack times to satisfy a desired performability level. The proposed condition is evaluated on a hard real-time system that employs the Rate-Monotonic (RM) scheduling algorithm and uses the re-execution mechanism to improve the reliability. Evaluation results reveal that by employing the condition, the level of performability of the system is always greater than the desired performability. In addition, it yields on average 1% improvement in the system performability in comparison with traditional schedulability conditions, while the actual failure rate is greater than the expected rate. This amount of performability improvement is significant for safety-critical real-time systems.