Jules Rankin

Despite our proclivity to make either tacit or overt passage of time judgments in daily life, insufficient work has been done to uncover the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning such determinations. A prima facie promising account of passage of time judgments derives from the predictive processing framework. More precisely, Hohwy et al. (2016) propose that the reported speed of the experienced passage of time is a function of how rapidly the perceptual system "distrusts the present" current perceptual hypothesis in favour of a new one. We will propose that this account suffers from an incapacity to explain the relevant empirical data related to passage of time judgments and also possesses its own internal shortcomings. In its place, we offer a predictive processing theory of passage of time judgments based on "error dynamics", according to which the sense of time moving quickly is grounded in the cognitive system’s subdoxastic detection that it is minimising prediction error at a faster rate than it expected. If, on the other hand, prediction error is being minimised at a slower rate than expected, time will be sensed to be moving slowly, and a more protracted PoTJ will be reported. We will demonstrate the internal consistency of this proposition, as well as its ability to account for the key empirical findings any model of passage of time judgments ought to explain.

This aim of this thesis is to provide an account of our experience of the flow of time. I will be employing a naturalistic approach to this philosophical question, which chiefly involves being heavily influenced by the natural sciences. I explore ways of incorporating the flow of time in our fundamental physical theories and end up defending a view that is consistent with there being no flow of time present in our fundamental physical theories. Instead, the flow of time arises from the adoption of a particular perspective that an embedded agent with a particular cognitive architecture possesses. I go on to describe such an agent in detail and show how this account sheds light on a variety of philosophical and scientific issues. I argue that this account of temporal flow naturally lends itself to a variety of scientific and philosophical applications. From explaining disparate sets of psychological phenomena under a unified mechanism, to providing insights into how to build better artificial intelligence systems, to addressing long-standing debates within the philosophy of time surrounding the relationship between our experiences of time and the metaphysics of time, and finally pointing to new directions for empirical work into our experience of time. I believe that the account presented in this thesis does justice to our experience of the flow of time, its ubiquity, and its seeming intangibility. While other accounts have argued that such an experience is a mere illusion or cognitive error, I argue it can (and should) be thought of as veridical and that it arises from the core of what it means to be an embodied agent.

We review some recent strands in the philosophy and physics of time. We explain the new orthodoxy denying time any fundamental status, and then turn to several proposals that deny this. There is a standard procedure to square the opposing views by looking at the way agents are embedded in the universe. This has also been questioned by some recent work. We focus on Lee Smolin’s recent work in this vein and on his view that novelty and freedom pose problems for anti-fundamentalist views. We ultimately defend this component.