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Books

Experiencing Time by Simon Prosser

Heather Dyke passes time reading about a denial of the passing of time.

If there’s one thing we can all be sure about when contemplating the nature of time, it’s that time passes, right? Whether we’re busily engaged in daily tasks, quietly absorbed in a book, watching a sunset, remembering an awkward encounter, or looking forward to a holiday, our experience tells us that time flows. We approach the future, leaving the past behind us, always occupying the present, although the present is constantly changing. This, we feel sure, is the nature of our temporal experience; and on the basis of this experience we infer that these descriptions correctly describe the nature of temporal reality. That is, we take our experience as of time flowing to be veridical – we have no reason to think we’re being deceived – so we conclude that time really does flow.

Simon Prosser, a lecturer in philosophy at St Andrews University, rejects this conclusion.

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