Nov 13, 2025 09:37 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 13, 2025 09:47 PM by C C.)
https://theconversation.com/what-is-time...ion-266634
EXCERPT: . . . This brings us to a pivotal question: If there is no such thing as the passage of time, why does everyone seem to think that there is? One common option has been to suggest that the passage of time is an “illusion” – exactly as Einstein famously described it at one point.
Calling the passage of time “illusory” misleadingly suggests that our belief in the passage of time is a result of misperception, as though it were some sort of optical illusion. But I think it’s more accurate to think of this belief as resulting from misconception.
As I propose in my book “A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time,” our sense of the passage of time is an example of psychological projection – a type of cognitive error that involves misconceiving the nature of your own experience.
The classic example is color. A red rose is not really red, per se. Rather, the rose reflects light at a certain wavelength, and a visual experience of this wavelength may give rise to a feeling of redness. My point is that the rose is neither really red nor does it convey the illusion of redness.
The red visual experience is just a matter of how we process objectively true facts about the rose. It’s not a mistake to identify a rose by its redness; the rose enthusiast isn’t making a deep claim about the nature of color itself.
Similarly, my research suggests that the passage of time is neither real nor an illusion: It’s a projection based on how people make sense of the world. I can’t really describe the world without the passage of time any more than I can describe my visual experience of the world without referencing the color of objects.
I can say that my GPS “thinks” I took a wrong turn without really committing myself to my GPS being a conscious, thinking being. My GPS has no mind, and thus no mental map of the world, yet I am not wrong in understanding its output as a valid representation of my location and my destination.
Similarly, even though physics leaves no room for the dynamic passage of time, time is effectively dynamic to me as far as my experience of the world is concerned.
The passage of time is inextricably bound up with how humans represent our own experiences. Our picture of the world is inseparable from the conditions under which we, as perceivers and thinkers, experience and understand the world. Any description of reality we come up with will unavoidably be infused with our perspective. The error lies in confusing our perspective on reality with reality itself... (MORE - missing details)
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COMMENT: It's just a matter of recognizing how dependent your cognition is on the brain that produces it. A particular chunk-sequence of neural states is devoted purely to the information that it holds during its stretch. That distinct "island" of data processing becomes the "now" that your awareness is exclusively restricted to.
That chunk-sequence is not centrally about a different event in the past or a different event in the future, so it does not assign "real" status to those -- it does not "manifest" them. An increment of cognition (identifying and understanding) is fundamentally biased toward the information it applies to.
There is no brain state available that corresponds to apprehending your entire life in one shot. Only the individual divisions of consciousness along the brain's world line that break the whole up into a series, in which each -- in solipsist fashion -- believes that only it exists, or is taking "its brief turn" at existing.
EXCERPT: . . . This brings us to a pivotal question: If there is no such thing as the passage of time, why does everyone seem to think that there is? One common option has been to suggest that the passage of time is an “illusion” – exactly as Einstein famously described it at one point.
Calling the passage of time “illusory” misleadingly suggests that our belief in the passage of time is a result of misperception, as though it were some sort of optical illusion. But I think it’s more accurate to think of this belief as resulting from misconception.
As I propose in my book “A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time,” our sense of the passage of time is an example of psychological projection – a type of cognitive error that involves misconceiving the nature of your own experience.
The classic example is color. A red rose is not really red, per se. Rather, the rose reflects light at a certain wavelength, and a visual experience of this wavelength may give rise to a feeling of redness. My point is that the rose is neither really red nor does it convey the illusion of redness.
The red visual experience is just a matter of how we process objectively true facts about the rose. It’s not a mistake to identify a rose by its redness; the rose enthusiast isn’t making a deep claim about the nature of color itself.
Similarly, my research suggests that the passage of time is neither real nor an illusion: It’s a projection based on how people make sense of the world. I can’t really describe the world without the passage of time any more than I can describe my visual experience of the world without referencing the color of objects.
I can say that my GPS “thinks” I took a wrong turn without really committing myself to my GPS being a conscious, thinking being. My GPS has no mind, and thus no mental map of the world, yet I am not wrong in understanding its output as a valid representation of my location and my destination.
Similarly, even though physics leaves no room for the dynamic passage of time, time is effectively dynamic to me as far as my experience of the world is concerned.
The passage of time is inextricably bound up with how humans represent our own experiences. Our picture of the world is inseparable from the conditions under which we, as perceivers and thinkers, experience and understand the world. Any description of reality we come up with will unavoidably be infused with our perspective. The error lies in confusing our perspective on reality with reality itself... (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
COMMENT: It's just a matter of recognizing how dependent your cognition is on the brain that produces it. A particular chunk-sequence of neural states is devoted purely to the information that it holds during its stretch. That distinct "island" of data processing becomes the "now" that your awareness is exclusively restricted to.
That chunk-sequence is not centrally about a different event in the past or a different event in the future, so it does not assign "real" status to those -- it does not "manifest" them. An increment of cognition (identifying and understanding) is fundamentally biased toward the information it applies to.
There is no brain state available that corresponds to apprehending your entire life in one shot. Only the individual divisions of consciousness along the brain's world line that break the whole up into a series, in which each -- in solipsist fashion -- believes that only it exists, or is taking "its brief turn" at existing.
