Jun 17, 2026 05:43 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 17, 2026 05:55 PM by C C.)
Our experience of time is just as foundational as the physics
https://iai.tv/articles/our-experience-o..._auid=2020
INTRO: We want to trust the clock, dismissing our strange and flexible experience of time as mere "psychological distortion". But philosopher Manuel Delaflor argues this dismissal is a mistake. Drawing on relativity, neuroscience and the strange testimony of anaesthesia and psychedelics, he contends that time is not something that proceeds outside of ourselves, but is generated by minds navigating possibility and constraint. Rather than tracking a hidden reality, Delaflor argues the clock is just one model among many, and a poor one for love, grief, boredom and the moments that change a life.
EXCERPTS: So, once again, the questions arise: what exactly are we talking about when we say “time”? A substance? A dimension? A measure? A direction? A relation? And all of this before we have even turned inward, where the problem becomes intimate. Cognitive science has spent decades documenting that temporal experience can be fooled, stretched, compressed, reordered.
[...] Physics has already weakened the idea of a sovereign clock. Cognitive science has weakened the idea of an inner clock. Neurology has weakened the idea that temporal structure is guaranteed. Psychedelics show us that how we feel time can reach heights that are unthinkable, and anesthesia has shown that time can cease completely when experience is gone. At this point, the familiar escape route opens. People will still say, yes, experience is constructed, the brain distorts time, attention stretches it, memory rewrites it, anesthesia interrupts it, but beneath all that, there is still real time, objective time, the physicist’s time, the structure underneath the distortions. Sure, we have not nailed a description, but it is still… there.
[...] Now, if it is already hard to deny for objects, colours, sounds, and selves, the question that has been waiting under this entire essay becomes unavoidable. If objects are constructed rather than discovered, what about the space they supposedly occupy? If events are constructed rather than recorded, what about the time they supposedly occur in? Feel the full weight of this as the inherited picture starts to break. What if space and time are not the stage on which experience unfolds? What if they also belong to the map? Generated by the same cognitive process that generates chairs, colours, bodies, selves, paths, obstacles? What if spatiality emerges with the relations between actionable possibilities and constraints? What if temporality emerges as an orchestration for coordination, anticipation, memory, action? What if we are the ones generating time by weaving what-has-happened into what-can-happen-next, by making fragments navigable, by giving action depth, by allowing error, learning, effort, promise, guilt, grief, expectation to become possible? (MORE - details))
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Cognition is dependent upon memory. For instance, identifying and understanding _X_ as a "tree" can be conditional on a concept that has been stored in the brain for decades. But discerning a difference between one's last experience of the world and the specious "current" one is reliant upon immediate information storage of that former state and comparing it to the structure of the "imposter now" manifested in sensory experience.
Both can actually be subsumed by our temporal category of "past", because even if the external world did feature an objective, non-cognitive "flow", it would already have "moved on" by the time that fresh, incoming information interacts with the body and gets neurally processed. There would be no direct, non-mediated access to "outer change" anymore than there is with the rest of outer, existing affairs.
Humans seem to be capable of accepting indirect realism about the latter more easily than they can do that with time. Despite the so-called "flow" and its "absolute now" clearly being an attribute of phenomenal experience (belonging to the latter), the majority of us simply cannot stop projecting it upon the non-cognitive or non-generated world (or at least our popular, commonsense idea of a material realm being the case).
But a key reason for that is that our everyday language was built on presentism or an aspect of naive realism. You can't even talk about mind-independent (temporal) alternatives to the brain's phenomenal representation without having to use the biased words and grammar of an old communication system. It's akin to a Christian having to use Islamic tokens to discuss their religion, if only mime or icon symbology were allowed.
https://iai.tv/articles/our-experience-o..._auid=2020
INTRO: We want to trust the clock, dismissing our strange and flexible experience of time as mere "psychological distortion". But philosopher Manuel Delaflor argues this dismissal is a mistake. Drawing on relativity, neuroscience and the strange testimony of anaesthesia and psychedelics, he contends that time is not something that proceeds outside of ourselves, but is generated by minds navigating possibility and constraint. Rather than tracking a hidden reality, Delaflor argues the clock is just one model among many, and a poor one for love, grief, boredom and the moments that change a life.
EXCERPTS: So, once again, the questions arise: what exactly are we talking about when we say “time”? A substance? A dimension? A measure? A direction? A relation? And all of this before we have even turned inward, where the problem becomes intimate. Cognitive science has spent decades documenting that temporal experience can be fooled, stretched, compressed, reordered.
[...] Physics has already weakened the idea of a sovereign clock. Cognitive science has weakened the idea of an inner clock. Neurology has weakened the idea that temporal structure is guaranteed. Psychedelics show us that how we feel time can reach heights that are unthinkable, and anesthesia has shown that time can cease completely when experience is gone. At this point, the familiar escape route opens. People will still say, yes, experience is constructed, the brain distorts time, attention stretches it, memory rewrites it, anesthesia interrupts it, but beneath all that, there is still real time, objective time, the physicist’s time, the structure underneath the distortions. Sure, we have not nailed a description, but it is still… there.
[...] Now, if it is already hard to deny for objects, colours, sounds, and selves, the question that has been waiting under this entire essay becomes unavoidable. If objects are constructed rather than discovered, what about the space they supposedly occupy? If events are constructed rather than recorded, what about the time they supposedly occur in? Feel the full weight of this as the inherited picture starts to break. What if space and time are not the stage on which experience unfolds? What if they also belong to the map? Generated by the same cognitive process that generates chairs, colours, bodies, selves, paths, obstacles? What if spatiality emerges with the relations between actionable possibilities and constraints? What if temporality emerges as an orchestration for coordination, anticipation, memory, action? What if we are the ones generating time by weaving what-has-happened into what-can-happen-next, by making fragments navigable, by giving action depth, by allowing error, learning, effort, promise, guilt, grief, expectation to become possible? (MORE - details))
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Cognition is dependent upon memory. For instance, identifying and understanding _X_ as a "tree" can be conditional on a concept that has been stored in the brain for decades. But discerning a difference between one's last experience of the world and the specious "current" one is reliant upon immediate information storage of that former state and comparing it to the structure of the "imposter now" manifested in sensory experience.
Both can actually be subsumed by our temporal category of "past", because even if the external world did feature an objective, non-cognitive "flow", it would already have "moved on" by the time that fresh, incoming information interacts with the body and gets neurally processed. There would be no direct, non-mediated access to "outer change" anymore than there is with the rest of outer, existing affairs.
Humans seem to be capable of accepting indirect realism about the latter more easily than they can do that with time. Despite the so-called "flow" and its "absolute now" clearly being an attribute of phenomenal experience (belonging to the latter), the majority of us simply cannot stop projecting it upon the non-cognitive or non-generated world (or at least our popular, commonsense idea of a material realm being the case).
But a key reason for that is that our everyday language was built on presentism or an aspect of naive realism. You can't even talk about mind-independent (temporal) alternatives to the brain's phenomenal representation without having to use the biased words and grammar of an old communication system. It's akin to a Christian having to use Islamic tokens to discuss their religion, if only mime or icon symbology were allowed.