Empirical evidence suggests that people naïvely represent time as dynamical (i.e. as containing robust temporal passage). Yet many contemporary B-theorists deny that it seems to us, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. The question then arises as to why we represent time as dynamical if we do not have perceptual experiences which represent time as dynamical. We consider two hypotheses about why this might be: the temporally aperspectival replacement hypothesis and the moving open future hypothesis. We then empirically (...) test the moving open future hypothesis. According to that hypothesis, we represent the past as objectively fixed and the future open. And we represent that this objective openness moves as events that were open become fixed, such that in doing so, we represent a privileged moving present. We found no evidence for the moving open future hypothesis, which suggests that further investigation of the temporally aperspectival replacement hypothesis is called for. Our results also shed further light on our understanding of the respects in which we represent the future to be open, which, in turn, has implications for our theorising about the open future. (shrink)

Ajan luonnetta koskevissa käsityksissä on tyypillistä erottaa kaksi eriävää kantaa: A-teoreettinen presentismi ja B-teoreettinen eternalismi. Edeltävän väitetään tyypillisesti sopivan yhteen inhimillisen ajallisen kokemuksen kanssa ja jälkimmäisen ontologisesti perustavanlaatuisen luonnontieteen kanssa. Ilmikuvamme ajasta sisältää ehdottoman nykyisyyden ja yksisuuntaisen ajan kulun menneestä tulevaan. Tieteellinen kuva ajasta ei sisällä erityistä nykyisyyttä eikä ajan kulun edellyttämää dynaamista aikamuotojen muutosta. Monet ovat pitäneet kokemustamme ajan kulusta illuusiona. Tässä artikkelissa keskitytään A-sarjan mukaisen ajankulun virheteoreettiseen tulkintaan. Tarkastellaan mahdollisuutta, jonka mukaan meillä ei ole kyseistä kokemusta vaan kuvailemme (...) kokemustamme virheellisesti ajan virtaukseen liittyvillä vertauskuvilla. Tätä tukee fysikalistinen argumentti: Jos ajan kulun kokemuksellamme ei ole fysikaalista perustaa, meillä ei voi olla sen mukaista kokemustakaan ajasta. (shrink)

Ismael aims for an understanding of the nature of an embedded perspective of agents in a world. If successful, this would explain a cluster of ways in which from an embedded perspective, we experience the world in an array of temporally asymmetric ways. Moreover, these are ways that have led many philosophers to rather metaphysically inflationary views about the nature of time, according to which time itself really is dynamical, and is characterized by the movement of an objectively (i.e., non-perspectival) (...) present. Ismael aims to explain these features of our experience without positing any such metaphysical picture. She argues that there are constraints which prevent us from taking this Olympian conception of the world and our place in it, and that these, jointly, explain why we experience the world in these temporally asymmetric ways. We take up two related questions. First, what it would mean to say that these constraints are not merely epistemic, and second, how far these constraints get us in explaining why we experience the world in these ways. (shrink)

Temporal dynamists typically hold that it seems to us as though time robustly passes, and that its seeming so is explained by the fact that time does robustly pass. Temporal non-dynamists hold that time does not robustly pass. Some non-dynamists nevertheless hold that it seems as though it does: we have an illusory phenomenal state whose content represents robust passage. Call these phenomenal passage illusionists. Other non-dynamists argue that the phenomenal state in question is veridical and represents something other than (...) robust passage. Call this the veridical passage-less view. This paper argues in favour of the latter view over the former, by arguing that we should reject passage illusionism. (shrink)

In the contemporary landscape about temporal experience, debates concerning the “hard question” of the experience of the flow—as opposed to debates concerning more qualitative aspects of temporality, such as change, movement, succession and duration—are gaining more and more attention. The overall dialectics can be thought of in terms of a debate between the realists (who take the phenomenology of the flow of time seriously, and propose various account of it) and deflationists (who take our description of temporal phenomenology as “flowy” (...) to be spurious, and propose various explanation of this spuriousness). In this paper we look inside the realist side. We distinguish primitivist realism, according to which the feeling of time flowing is an irreducible sui generis phenomenology, and various forms of reductionist realism, according to which the experience of the flow is ultimately explainable in terms of a more basic phenomenology. We present reasons to be sceptical against the various reductionist proposals. The conclusion is thus disjunctive: either primitivism or deflationism is the correct account of the purported experience of the flow of time. (shrink)

This book defends a relational theory of the passage of time. The realist view of passage developed in this book differs from the robust, substantivalist position. According to relationism, passage is nothing over and above the succession of events, one thing coming after another. Causally related events are temporally arranged as they happen one after another along observers’ worldlines. There is no unique global passage but a multiplicity of local passages of time. After setting out this positive argument for relationism, (...) the author deals with five common objections to it: (a) triviality of deflationary passage, (b) a-directionality of passage, (c) the impossibility of experiencing passage, (d) fictionalism about passage, and (e) the incompatibility of passage with perduring objects. (shrink)

Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias; another is future-bias. Philosophical theorising about these biases often proceeds on two assumptions. First, that the two biases are _independent_: that they are explained by different factors (the independence assumption). Second, that there is a normative asymmetry between the two biases: one is rationally impermissible (near-bias) and the other rationally permissible (future-bias). The former assumption at least partly feeds into the latter: if the two biases were not explained by (...) different factors, then it would be less plausible that their normative statuses differ. This paper investigates the independence assumption and finds it unwarranted. In light of this, we argue, there is reason to question the normative asymmetry assumption. (shrink)

Deflationists hold that it does not seem to us, in experience, as though time robustly passes. There is some recent empirical evidence that appears to support this contention. Equally, empirical evidence suggests that we naïvely represent time as dynamical. Thus deflationists are faced with an explanatory burden. If, as they maintain, the world seems to us in experience as though it is non-dynamical, then why do we represent time as dynamical? This paper takes up the challenge of investigating, on the (...) part of the deflationist, one candidate explanation. We hypothesise that people’s belief that the future is what we call deliberatively open partly explains why they represent time as dynamical. In a series of two experiments we test this hypothesis. We find no evidence that beliefs about deliberative openness explain why people represent time as dynamical. Hence there remains an explanatory burden for the deflationist to discharge. (shrink)

People are ‘biased toward the future’: all else being equal, we typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. Several explanations have been suggested for this pattern of preferences. Adjudicating among these explanations can, among other things, shed light on the rationality of future-bias: For instance, if our preferences are explained by unjustified beliefs or an illusory phenomenology, we might conclude that they are irrational. This paper investigates one hypothesis, according to which future-bias (...) is explained by our having a phenomenology that we describe, or conceive of, as being as of time robustly passing. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found no evidence in its favour. Our results present a puzzle, however, when compared with the results of an earlier study. We conclude that although robust passage phenomenology on its own probably does not explain future-bias, having this phenomenology and taking it to be veridical may contribute to future-bias. (shrink)

Appeals to the ‘common sense’, or ‘naïve’, or ‘folk’ concept of time, and the purported phenomenology as of time passing, play a substantial role in philosophical theorising about time. When making these appeals, philosophers have been content to draw upon their own assumptions about how non-philosophers think about time. This paper reviews a series of recent experiments bringing these assumptions into question. The results suggest that the way non-philosophers think about time is far less metaphysically demanding than philosophers have assumed.

The philosophical investigation of perceptual illusions can generate fruitful insights in the study of subjective time consciousness. However, the way illusions are interpreted is often controversial. Recently, proponents of the so-called dynamic snapshot theory have appealed to the Waterfall Illusion, a kind of motion aftereffect, to support a particular view of temporal consciousness according to which experience is structured as a series of instantaneous snapshots with dynamic qualities. This dynamism is meant to account for familiar features of the phenomenology of (...) time, such as succession, continuity, and change. Previous theories have typically appealed to a subjective present occupying an interval of time; that is, a “specious present.” I argue, through analysis of motion aftereffect illusions and the rare condition of akinetopsia, i.e. motion-blindness, that the Waterfall Illusion fails to support the dynamic snapshot theory as intended. Furthermore, I suggest that future theories of subjective time should see temporal phenomenology as the result of non-localised processes closely tied to the mechanism underlying consciousness generally. (shrink)

Philosophical debates about the metaphysics of time typically revolve around two contrasting views of time. On the A-theory, time is something that itself undergoes change, as captured by the idea of the passage of time; on the B-theory, all there is to time is events standing in before/after or simultaneity relations to each other, and these temporal relations are unchanging. Philosophers typically regard the A-theory as being supported by our experience of time, and they take it that the B-theory clashes (...) with how we experience time and therefore faces the burden of having to explain away that clash. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether these intuitions about the experience of time are shared by the general public. We asked directly for people’s subjective reports of their experience of time—in particular, whether they believe themselves to have a phenomenology as of time’s passing—and we probed their understanding of what time’s passage in fact is. We find that a majority of participants do share the aforementioned intuitions, but interestingly a minority do not. (shrink)

We regularly talk of the experience of time passing. Some theorists have taken the supposed phenomenology of time passing to provide support for metaphysical accounts of the nature of time; opposing theorists typically granted that there is a phenomenology of time passing while seeking to dispute that any metaphysical conclusions about time can be drawn from this. In recent debates theorists have also begun to dispute that there is a phenomenology of time passing – plausibly, if there is not, then (...) there is no relevant experience to be explained away, or for metaphysical conclusions to be drawn from. In the present paper I offer one explanation of why such disputes about the experience of time passing may seem intractable. However, I suggest that there is a distinct and more tractable issue lurking in this area, concerning our experience of how certain phenomena persist over time. Interestingly, articulating how we experience different phenomena as persisting over time doesn't simply provide a challenge to one metaphysical view of persistence rather than another; instead, it generates an explanatory challenge for a variety of competing views of persistence and, by extension, a challenge for popular combinations of views of the metaphysics of persistence and of time. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that a majority of people believe that time robustly passes and that many also report that it seems to them, in experience, as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists deny that time robustly passes, and many contemporary non-dynamists—deflationists—even deny that it seems to us as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists, then, face the dual challenge of explaining why people have such beliefs and make such reports about their experiences. Several philosophers have suggested the stable-self explanation, according to which (...) what partly explains one or both of the explananda is that people believe themselves to have a stable persisting self that is imagined either as moving through time or as being stationary with time moving around it. This paper empirically investigates this explanation. We found, however, no evidential support for the stable-self explanation, leaving the non-dynamist but also, we will argue, the dynamist with an extant explanatory challenge. (shrink)

Here, I put forward a new account of how experience gives rise to the belief that time passes. While there is considerable disagreement amongst metaphysicians as to whether time really does pass, it has struck many as a default, ‘common sense’ way of thinking about the world. A popular way of explaining how such a belief arises is to say that it seems perceptually as though time passes. Here I outline some difficulties for this approach, and propose instead that the (...) belief in time passing is elicited by a particular feature of agentive experience. When we deliberately move our bodies, bring something to mind, or focus our attention, we experience ourselves as the sources of these actions. Sensing oneself as a source, I argue, is a unique type of change experience, one which leads us to a belief that time is passing. (shrink)

Although many B-theorists do not think that our perceptual experience provides evidence that time passes, they accept that we at least seem to be aware of time’s passage. Consequently, they accept the burden of explaining away the appearance of passage. This paper discuss three arguments aiming to discharge this burden. The first two arguments allow that there is a distinctive phenomenology of passage, whereas the third argues that the belief in passage phenomenology is the result of a cognitive error. None (...) of the arguments succeeds. The first two rest on assumptions that the A-theorist has reasons to reject, in light of facts about the nature of conscious experience – facts concerning both its basis in physical and functional processes, and facts concerning its representation of duration. The third argument fails to provide a compelling account of the source of our belief in passage phenomenology. (shrink)

Presentists believe that only present things exist. Their theories, at first glance, seem to offer many admirable features: a simple ontology, and a meaningful, objective status for key temporal phenomena, such as the present moment and the passage of time. So intuitive is this theory that, as John Bigelow puts it, presentism was “believed by everyone...until at least the nineteenth century”. Yet, in the last 200 years presentism has been beset by criticisms from both physicists and metaphysicians. One of the (...) most significant criticisms is that presentists cannot provide an acceptable system of truthmaking. If there is no past, how can there still be truths about the past? In this paper, I introduce a new theory of presentism, which addresses this problem in a novel way: by simply denying that there are any truths about the past. While prima facie an unintuitive position, I will argue that a sensible presentist philosophy of this kind can be described, so long as it is accompanied by an appropriate system of physics. I will also indicate at certain points that adopting presentism could allow us to understand fundamental physics in new, more intuitive ways. By the end of the paper, I hope to not only show that hard presentism is a defensible theory of time, but also that it could offer a number of advantages to the physicist and the philosopher alike. (shrink)