The "Flow" of Time

Philosopher and physicist Bernardo Kastrup challenges readers in an article in Scientific American to consider that our apparent experience of the flow of time is really an illusion. He writes,

There can only be experiential flow if there is experience in the past, present and future. But where is the past? Is it anywhere out there? Can you point at it? Clearly not.

What makes you conceive of the idea of the past is the fact that you have memories. But these memories can only be referenced insofar as they are experienced now, as memories. There has never been a single point in your entire life in which the past has been anything other than memories experienced in the present.

The same applies to the future: where is it? Can you point at it and say “there is the future”? Clearly not. Our conception of the future arises from expectations or imaginings experienced now, always now, as expectations or imaginings.

There has never been a single point in your life in which the future has been anything other than expectations or imaginings experienced in the present.

But if the past and the future are not actually experienced in the, well, past and future, how can there be an experiential flow of time? Where is experiential time flowing from and into?

He goes on to draw an analogy from space: Let’s make an analogy with space. Suppose that you suddenly find yourself sitting on the side of a long, straight desert road. Looking ahead, you see mountains in the distance. Looking behind, you see a dry valley.

The mountains and the valley provide references that allow you to locate yourself in space. But the mountains, the valley, your sitting on the roadside, all exist simultaneously in the present snapshot of your conscious life.

Kastrup argues that just as you wouldn't construe from seeing the mountains ahead and the valley behind while you sit by the roadside, that you are moving on the road. You aren't; you are simply taking account of your relative position on it. You have no more experiential reason to believe that time flows than that space flows while you sit admiring the landscape.

He concludes with this:

The ostensible experience of temporal flow is thus an illusion. All we ever actually experience is the present snapshot, which entails a timescape of memories and imaginings analogous to the landscape of valley and mountains. Everything else is a story.

The implications of this realization for physics and philosophy are profound. Indeed, the relationship between time, experience and the nature of reality is liable to be very different from what we currently assume....

The article is fairly brief, but Kastrup manages to fit several other interesting insights into it. If the ontology of time interests you, you should check it out.