Jules Rankin

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.