On the Perception of Time

July 26, 2017 timothywstanley@me.com

I’m particularly drawn to the work that is done in the lab on perception of time, because I think that has the ability to make rapid advances in the coming years. For example, there are famous experiments in which people apparently make free decisions at certain moments and yet it’s found that the decision was actually made a little bit earlier, but their own perception of time and their actions within time have been sort of edited after the event. When we observe the world, what we see is an apparently consistent and smooth narrative, but actually the brain is just being bombarded with sense data from different senses and puts all this together. It integrates it and then presents a consistent narrative as it were the conscious self. And so we have this impression that we’re in charge and everything is all smoothly put together. But as a matter of fact, most of this is, is a narrative that’s recreated after the event.

"Where Did Time Come From? And Why Does It Seem to Flow?" - http://nautil.us/blog/-where-did-time-come-from-and-why-does-it-seem-to-flow. Interesting interview with a physicist on the nature of time. Of note is that his response to the question on recent advances is philosophically oriented towards the phenomenology of the perception of time. For instance, Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative seems particularly apropos.