Perceiving, imagining and recognizing are processes taking place in a sentient system and taking time to transpire. A brain, unlike a mirror, takes time to reflect.
Presence is temporary, knowledge and memory are temporal. There are no coded symbols filed in the brain awaiting access; the only physical tracks laid down by learning or experience are changes in connectivity. Remembering and recognition are the activation, the actual following, of those tracks, which always happens in parallel with many other ongoing processes in the brain. Memories as traces of past processes are implicated in those processes, and we can explicate them only by means of external signs which have their own implications. Personal history, like the historical or scientific consensus, is a product of externalization.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.
— Laurie Anderson, ‘From the Air’
Experiencing is the little current within the flow of time trying to make sense of history – like tears in rain, as Roy Batty said.