# [[reviewing that meditation paper 10 Jul 2025]] #refereeing ## introduction Frischhut’s Extended Now Interpretation (ExNI) treats the minimal temporal feature in deep meditation ("Meditation*") as _duration without phenomenal succession_: a single "NOW" that "fills out the entire duration of Meditation*" and within which "there is no awareness of change, succession, temporal order, beginning or end" (pp. 13–15). [[The author]]’s Enduring Now Interpretation (EdNI) treats the minimal feature as an _enduring now_: moment‑to‑moment renewal of awareness generates a representation of a moving present, so a minimal sense of [[temporal passage]] is preserved (pp. 11–13). ## problems The theory's potential weakness is that its central claim—that [[the experience]] involves succession—seems to contradict the explicit reports of meditators who describe [[the state]] as lacking a "before and after". [[The author]] must qualify this succession as "subtle" and "pre-reflective," [[[manuscript]], p. 11, 16] which could be seen as a re-interpretation of the phenomenal data that is less direct than Frischhut's. Other problems: 1. _Renewal of awareness._ On pp. 11–12 [[the author]] notes that meditators "must renew their awareness of the ‘now’ at each moment", but no psychological or neuro‑functional account of how such renewal occurs is provided. Is it a discrete attentional redirection (as described in Hasenkamp et al. 2012), a rhythmic fluctuation in tonic alertness, or an implicit metacognitive check? Without clarifying whether renewal is an event, a process, or a dispositional backdrop, the phrase remains metaphorical. 2. _Endurance of nowness._ At p. 18 [[the author]] writes that "the property of nowness can change its temporal locations (e.g. nowness at t₁, nowness at t₂, …)" and labels this an "enduring now". Yet endurance here is equated with serial relocation rather than literal persistence of one entity across times. This assimilates endurance to reiteration and risks circularity: the explanation of felt passage presupposes a moving‑present representation whose motion is the very datum to be explained. 3. _Dynamic‑snapshot analogy._ The paper imports the dynamic‑snapshot model from perceptual motion studies (Prosser 2016; Arstila 2018). Those studies depend on sensory change vectors embedded in visual content. In pp. 12–14 [[the author]] applies the model to meditation, where content is allegedly minimal, by asserting that a comparable "pure motion" signal operates. The argument would benefit from citing empirical markers—e.g. sub‑second fluctuations in interoceptive or monitoring networks (cf. Dor‑Ziderman et al. 2013)—to show that motion‑coding mechanisms remain active in content‑sparse states. While [[the author]] of the [[_Legacy/Research/Manuscripts/manuscript]] does offer justifications for their view, one can argue that these justifications are [[not sufficient]] to meet this high burden. The critique can be developed by examining [[the nature]] of [[the author]]'s arguments: "pre-reflective renewal of awareness" why not put this in the terms that Young uses.