Abstract
Attempts to grasp the nature of time are amongst the deepest and most puzzling challenges to the human mind. Our immediate perception of the passage of time is connected with consciousness, an equally enigmatic phenomenon. Everyone will agree to experience time as a continuous stream. However, a closer look via introspection breaks up the continuum and reveals discrete elements showing up as thoughts or mental events. Thus, in our conscious experience of time continuity and discreteness are delicately interwoven. We are endowed with a feeling of nowness binding together events from external or internal perceptions which occur within a certain window of space and time. The immediate conscious presence appears to possess a temporal extension, which allows to access voluntarily a selection of specific events, somehow laid out within an extended present. In a simple picture, we can compare the experience of events in the flow of time with viewing pearls lined up on a string in continuous motion with past events “dropping successively away, and the incomings of the future making up the loss” (James 1950).
The objective world simply is, it does not happen. (Hermann Weyl, 1949)
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Euler, M. (1997). Sensations of Temporality: Models and Metaphors from Acoustic Perception. In: Atmanspacher, H., Ruhnau, E. (eds) Time, Temporality, Now. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60707-3_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60707-3_12
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