Physical Time and Experienced Time

Abstract

In our direct experience time is strikingly different from space: time has a dynamical aspect that space completely lacks. This feeling of flow and passage is well represented in the A-theory of time, in which the concept of a moving Now is central. Given the clarity and immediacy of our experience of temporal flow it seems that the rival “static” B-theory, in which there are only unchanging temporal relations, starts with an enormous handicap: whereas the A-theory directly explains our experience of time, the B-theory must apparently squirm itself out of the problem of explaining it away as an illusion.

However, on second thought it is not so clear how the A-explanation of our experience is supposed to work. Even if the A-theory were to be correct and the flow of time an objective feature of reality, there still is the question of how this objective motion of the Now could make itself felt in our apperception of time. The problem is that the concepts of objective passage and becoming that are central in the A-theory do not make contact with anything we know about how natural processes work and therefore cannot help us to understand our perception in a naturalistic, scientific way. This problem is acutely illustrated when we look at recent philosophical work on the A-theory. These approaches usually accept tenses as a primitive concept (by employing primitive tense operators). But these primitive tenses do not relate to what we know about how time perception functions; from a physical or physiological point of view it is mysterious how primitive tenses could help to explain our intuitions.

By contrast, the concepts used in the B-theory of time do connect with scientific theory. Perhaps surprisingly, explaining our experience of passage has better prospects in the B-theory than in the A-theory.