On Explaining Why Time Seems to Pass

Abstract

Usually, the B‐theory of time is taken to involve the claim that time does not, in reality, pass; after all, on the B‐theory, nothing really becomes present and then more and more past, times do not come into existence successively, and which facts obtain does not change. For this reason, many B‐theorists have recently tried to explain away one or more aspect(s) of experience that they and their opponents take to constitute an experience of time as passing. In this paper, I examine three prominent proposals of this kind and argue that, though intriguing, the proposals undermine, to some extent, the assumption that there is an element of experience that B‐theorists need to take to be illusory.

Explaining temporal qualia

“…Miller et al (2018) detail a range of different veridicalist positions. 7 Deng (2013) and Hoerl (2014) each express scepticism as to whether we have a phenomenology of passage, and argue that the passage-antirealist (for Deng, the 'B theorist'; for Hoerl, the 'reductionist' about temporal passage) possess sufficient resources to account for the apparently animated aspects of change and motion perception without recourse to the passage realist's ontology. 8 The examples of change and motion we consider in this paper concern only visual perception.…”

“…SeeDeng (2013) andHoerl (2014) for criticisms of the claim that we have experiences 'as of' passage.…”

“… As Norton (2010, p. 23)notes: '[w]e know what illusions are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an illusion'.26 Alternatively,Deng (2013) suggests that the analogy drawn by Paul is itself ambiguous: either the illusion of motion in the phi phenomenon and the illusionist's alleged illusion of passage are distinct illusions; or they are different aspects of the same illusion. If the former, Deng suggests that 'it is hard to see what the second illusion [the illusion of passage] could be' (p. 377).…”

Presentism and Temporal Experience

“…First, it is not at all obvious that we actually have experiences of temporal passage (see note 23). For more discussion on this point, see Prosser (2007), Deng (2013a), Frischhut (2013) and Hoerl (2014). Second, one might wonder whether presentism has the tools to account for any form of objective temporal passage.…”

Time and the domain of consciousness

“…All that phenomena like apparent motion can show, it seems, is that we can sometimes misperceive facts that fit one B‐theoretical description for facts that fit another B‐theoretical description. Rather than making intelligible how there can be illusory experiences as of passage, even though there is no such thing as passage, Paul's argument should actually lead us to ask whether certain aspects of perceptual experience that we are prone to describe in passage‐implying terminology are not, in fact, thus misdescribed, because they actually present us with a world that is just as the B‐theory has it …”