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Consciousness and the Present

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Book cover Cosmological and Psychological Time

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ((BSPS,volume 285))

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Abstract

A perennial question in the philosophy of time concerns the relation between the objective “physical time” that features in empirical theories of motion and the subjective “human time” in which our own experiences unfold. This article is about one facet of this broader question: whether the phenomenon of consciousness allows us to make a principled distinction between the present and other times. A number of authors have argued that, without conscious observers, there would be no distinctions of past, present, and future. This paper defends the opposing thesis that there is no interesting connection between consciousness and presentness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also Meyer (2005). Dolev (2007) attempts to bridge the gap between continental and analytic approaches to the philosophy of time.

  2. 2.

    See Dainton (2008, 2011), Hoerl (2009), Paul (2010), and Prosser (2012). A survey of the neurological basis of temporal processing can be found in Mauk and Buonomano (2004) and Buhusi and Meck (2005); see also Canales (2009).

  3. 3.

    It is not at all clear what notion of possibility we need to employ for this purpose, but let me pass over this here; see Torre (2011) for more details.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, 13346, USA

    Ulrich Meyer

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  1. Ulrich Meyer
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Correspondence to Ulrich Meyer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Yuval Dolev

  2. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Michael Roubach

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Meyer, U. (2016). Consciousness and the Present. In: Dolev, Y., Roubach, M. (eds) Cosmological and Psychological Time. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 285. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22590-6_8

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