In his new book “A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time“- Wake Forest University Professor Adrian Bardon. offers that our experience of the passage of time is an example of psychological projection—a type of cognitive error that involves misunderstanding the nature of your own experience.
“Time flies,” “time waits for no one,” “time passes”: the way we talk about time tends to strongly imply that the passage of time is some kind of real process that happens somewhere in the world. We live in the present moment and move through time, although events come and go, dissolving into the past.
But let us try to actually put into words what is meant by the passage or passage of time. Flow of what? Rivers flow because water is in motion. What does it mean to say that time flows?
Events are more like events than things, but we speak as if their location is constantly changing in the future, present or past. But if some events take place in the future and are moving towards you, and some from the past are moving away, then where are they? The future and past seem to have no physical location.
People have been thinking about time for as long as we have a record of people thinking about anything at all. The concept of time inevitably permeates every thought you have about yourself and the world around you.
This is why, as a philosopher, philosophical and scientific developments in our understanding of time have always seemed especially important to me.
Ancient philosophers about time
Ancient philosophers were very suspicious of the very idea of time and change. Parmenides of Elea was a Greek philosopher of the 6th-5th centuries BC.
Parmenides asked the question: if the future does not yet exist and the past no longer exists, then how could events move from the future to the present and into the past?
He reasoned like this: if the future is real, then it is real now; and if what is real now is only the present, the future is unreal.
So, if the future is unreal, then the occurrence of any present event is a case of something inexplicably arising out of nothing.
Parmenides was not the only skeptic about time. Similar considerations regarding the contradictions inherent in the way we talk about time appear in Aristotle, in the ancient Hindu school known as Advaita Vedanta, and in the works of Augustine of Hippo, also known as St. Augustine, to name a few.
Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity
Early modern physicist Isaac Newton proposed the existence of an invisible but real passage of time. For Newton, time is a dynamic physical phenomenon that exists in the background, a regular, ticking universal clock by which all motions and accelerations can be objectively described.
Then Albert Einstein came along.
Einstein in 1905 and 1915 proposed his special and general theories of relativity respectively. These theories confirmed all the long-held suspicions about the very concept of time and change.
The theory of relativity rejects Newton's idea of time as a universal physical phenomenon.
In Einstein's time, researchers showed that the speed of light is constant, regardless of the speed of the source. He argued that taking this fact seriously means recognizing all velocities of objects as relative.
Nothing is ever at rest or in motion; it all depends on your “belief system.”
A frame of reference defines the spatial and temporal coordinates that a given observer assigns to objects and events, based on the assumption that he or she is at rest relative to everything else.
Someone floating in space sees a spaceship flying by to the right. But the Universe itself is completely neutral regarding whether the observer is at rest and the ship is moving to the right, or whether the ship is at rest and the observer is moving to the left.
This concept influences our understanding of what a watch actually does. Since the speed of light is constant, two observers moving relative to each other will assign different times to different events.
In a famous example, two lightning strikes occur simultaneously at an equal distance from an observer at a train station, who can see both at the same time.
An observer on a train, moving towards one lightning strike and moving away from another, will assign different times to the strikes.
This occurs because one observer moves away from the light coming from one impact and moves closer to the light coming from another.
The other observer is stationary relative to the lightning strikes, so the corresponding light from each of them reaches him at the same time. Neither is right or wrong.
How much time passes between events and at what time something happens depends on the observer's frame of reference.
Observers moving relative to each other will, at any given moment, disagree about what events are currently occurring; events that are happening now, according to the calculations of one observer, at any given moment will lie in the future for another observer, and so on.
According to the theory of relativity, all times are equally real. Everything that has ever happened or will ever happen is happening now to a hypothetical observer. There are no events that are merely potential or merely memories. There is no single, absolute, universal present, and therefore no passage of time as events supposedly “become” present.
Change simply means that the situation is different at different times. At any moment I remember certain things. In later moments I remember more. That's all there is to the passage of time.
This doctrine, widely accepted today among both physicists and philosophers, is known as “eternalism.”
This brings us to the key question: if the passage of time does not exist, then why does everyone think that it does?
Time as a psychological projection
One common option was to suggest that the passage of time is an illusion, just as Einstein once described it.
Calling the passage of time “illusory” may mistakenly suggest that our belief in the passage of time is the result of a misperception, as if it were some kind of optical illusion.
But I think it would be more correct to consider this belief the result of a delusion.
As I suggest in my book:A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time“Our sense of the passage of time is an example of psychological projection.
A classic example is color. A red rose is not itself red. Rather, the rose reflects a specific wavelength of light, and the visual perception of that wavelength can cause the sensation of redness.
My point is that the rose is not actually red and does not give the illusion of redness.
The visual experience of the color red is simply a matter of how we process objectively true facts about the rose.
It would not be a mistake to identify a rose by its red color; The rose lover makes no serious claims about the nature of the color itself.
Likewise, my research shows that the passage of time is neither real nor an illusion: it is a projection based on how people perceive the world.
In fact, I cannot describe the world without reference to the passage of time, just as I cannot describe my visual perception of the world without reference to the color of objects.
I can tell that my GPS “thinks” I've taken a wrong turn, but I don't actually think that my GPS is a conscious, thinking being.
My GPS has no mind and therefore no mental map of the world, yet I am not mistaken in understanding its results as a true representation of my location and destination.
Likewise, although physics makes no room for the dynamic flow of time, time is in fact dynamic for me in terms of my perception of the world.
The passage of time is inextricably linked to how people represent their own experiences.
Our picture of the world is inseparable from the conditions under which we, perceivers and thinkers, experience and understand the world.
Any description of reality that we come up with will inevitably be infused with our point of view.
The mistake is that we confuse our view of reality with reality itself.
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Adrian Bardon. 2025. A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time (Second Edition). Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780197684108
Author: Professor Adrian Bardonresearcher at Wake Forest University.
This article was originally published on Talk.
