How our brains create time (Humans)

by David Turell , Wednesday, September 21, 2022, 17:26 (792 days ago) @ David Turell

A slightly different approach:

https://psyche.co/ideas/time-doesnt-flow-like-a-river-so-why-do-we-feel-swept-along?utm...

"Heraclitus thought that time was like a river: ‘Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.’

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"Physicists and philosophers may have different approaches to the structure of time, but what unites them is a rejection of the notion that that there is a ‘now’, a present moment, that moves from the past toward the future. If that is true, and time does not really move, we are left with a question: why does it seem to pass? We would never mistake a frozen river for a running one, so, if nothing flows and everything abides, why does it feel as if time is rushing by?

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"Just as the world is not set up for someone to hallucinate a square circle, the world is not set up for the illusion of time passing. So if the flow of time is not an illusion, what is it?

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"The arguments above – that flowing time is an illusion or a result of how we experience changing objects – appeal to our perception of the world to explain why time seems to pass. We see, smell, hear or feel things moving and changing, but perhaps the feeling of time passing is not related to our experience of sensing the world. We also feel pain in our bodies; feel emotions, intuitions and yearnings. The important word here is ‘feel’. In these cases, we are not perceiving the outside world. These non-perceptual experiences include the feeling of doing things, of making changes in the world: we feel ourselves walking and running, opening doors and tapping screens, talking and listening. I think time passing is a result of how we experience the changes that we make in our daily lives.

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"When you move your body, you feel yourself making changes in the world around you; when you refocus your thoughts, you experience yourself changing the landscape of your mind. We could call this ‘agentive change’ – change that an agent (like you, for example) experiences themselves as causing – and it is pervasive in a way that perceptual experiences of change in our external environment are not. As long as you are awake, you won’t stop thinking, meaning that the feeling of making mental changes persists (even in a sensory deprivation tank).

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"As long as you are awake, you will never feel as if you can stop causing change. Jean-Paul Sartre declared that mankind was ‘condemned to be free’; similarly, we find ourselves at every waking moment condemned to act. Of course, we stop acting when we fall asleep but, as any insomniac will tell you, sleep is something you must wait for, not something you do. You can hasten sleep’s arrival, but you cannot switch yourself off like a laptop.

"I believe that this leads us to mistake the feeling of doing – moving, thinking, focusing – for the feeling of time passing. We experience ourselves as perpetually, helplessly active. This is likely a product of our neurophysiology. Brains don’t stop: information is continually being received, recalled, processed and responded to, so it is not surprising that we always find ourselves doing something. But we are not consciously aware of this fact. In fact, consciousness does not provide any explanation as to why we find ourselves in such a state. We are driven to keep making changes. And it is here that we make a mistake. Rather than blaming our neurophysiology for the feeling that we must constantly act, we blame the world outside: we mistakenly think that some outside force (like a flowing river of time) is responsible for the ever-present feeling that we are being ‘pushed along’.

"We are condemned to act. It is not, as Heraclitus imagined, that ‘everything flows and nothing abides.’ Instead, the feeling of being swept along is the result of our brains’ constant churning. We mistake our own momentum for that of the world. Time does not flow. We do."

Comment: the author tells us we innately create the sense of time. But there is real time in those physics' equations, or is it?