FINITUDE

The Psychology of Self and Time

Philippe Rochat

Time in Mind Many of the ideas contained in this book came from storming reflections
and notes I feverishly wrote on multiple little Moleskine black books that fit my back
pocket while cruising the Atlantic and the Mediterranean as well as hopping islands in
the South Pacific between May and December 2019. This journey also included a 3-
month stay to write at my favorite, always inspiring 17th-century library Mazarine in
Paris, the oldest in France. It sits on the left bank of the Seine, in the prestigious,
ultratraditional, and in many ways oddly time-warped complex of the French
Academies.
Through tall windows bringing dim light, surrounded by rows of ancient books and
illustrious busts, one can contemplate the murky Seine River splitting the city in half
with relentless, yet imperceptible force. Thinking about time in this majestic space was
most appropriate, with an old clock softly marking the hour, rhythmically interrupting
the religious silence. It reminds us that while lost in our books and computer screens,
we were not in eternity. In the church-like atmosphere of the reading room, there is
palpable melancholy, the kind that poet Guillaume Apollinaire captured staring at the
same river over a century ago in one of his poems Le pont Mirabeau: Under the
Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine
And our loves
Must I remember them
Joy always followed pain
The night falls and the hours ring
The days go away I remain

Hand in hand let us stay face to face

While underneath the bridge
Of our arms passes
The water tired of the eternal looks
The night falls and the hours ring
The days go away I remain
Love goes away like this flowing water
Love goes away Life is so slow
And hope is so violent
The night falls and the hours ring
The days go away I remain
Days pass by and weeks pass by
Neither past time
Nor past loves will return
Under the Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine
The night falls and the hours ring
The days go away I remain

Guillaume Apollinaire, from Alcools (1913)

That is some of the context in which I tried to wrap my head around time. Often,
I thought that I was delusional in attacking such a steep topic. The journey started being
on the move, experiencing the slow, regular, and relentless humming pace of merchant
ships and other ferries I thought were most appropriate to think about time. It helped me
to focus and not give up in my enterprise. Then all came to an abrupt stop with the
pandemic.
Writing this book has been a great adventure, from roaming the seas to being suddenly
glued to one place. Stuck at home, with the eerie feeling that time had suddenly came to
a halt, I started rereading my feverish and abundant traveling notes randomly
accumulated over the past few months. From free roaming the world and sharing
intimate moments with all kinds of people, I was suddenly like anybody surrounded by
closed shops, deserted streets, and forced into social distancing, changing sidewalks,
and dancing around people to avoid contamination. I was suddenly compelled to
participate in the collective hypochondriasis, the collective paranoia screaming the one
truth that we all share: no one wants to die! That was a sad, depressing period of our
lives. It also opened a rare opportunity to immerse myself into writing my time project
and finalize it. Here it is.
In many ways, writing this book has been a savior. I used forced confinement to fulfill a
project that I often thought was a real stretch, much too large, and much too
complicated. God knows if this book would have ever existed without the pandemic and
all the infamous political turmoil that shook the world and my country of adoption.
I finalized the writing of this book from March to November 2020 at my Atlanta home,
like possessed and with minimum distraction. In the process, I discovered and learned a
lot. Incomparable is the pleasure of discovering as you write, witnessing your own
thoughts taking shape, clearing up, aligned on the paper or computer screen, brick by
brick. My hope is that this book reflects the intense pleasure of discovery I had in
writing it. In a rare moment of intimacy, years ago, I asked my father what he thought
about death, a question I always wanted to ask him. “It is rather annoying,” he replied,
with not an ounce of hesitation. For whatever reason, I never felt closer to my old man.
A few months later, he was floored by a massive heart attack. Avid sailor, he was
rushing to see a regatta at the July 1992 Summer Olympic games that was taking place
in sizzling Barcelona. My father died like Montaigne hoped to die: “May death find me
as I am planting my cabbages,” adding in another one of his essays: “When I dance,
I dance . . .” The thought of my father and Montaigne’s spirit did hover in my head
while writing this book. In many ways, it was time for me to think about time.
I want to express my debt, love, and appreciation to my former PhD advisor
Michelangelo Flückiger who provided me with very generous comments on parts of the
book. Almost half a century ago, he gave me invaluable academic freedom when I was
a budding and troubled young scientist at his Perception Lab in Geneva. His free spirit,
larger than life enthusiasm, and contagious curiosity influenced me much more than he
would think, notwithstanding the fact that he introduced me to the psychophysics of
time in children using a novel experimental paradigm of his invention (“les ajustements
incessants”). He was a model of how to use time creatively and with fierce
independence in the rather rigid world of academia.
My appreciation to my Lab, students, and colleagues with whom I  shared some of my
early ideas on time; to my ex-Lab coordinator, Amber Wallace for her cogent read and
feedback on a very first draft of the book. I thank Emory University, my home
institution of 30 years, for its continuing support in giving me time to think.
I am grateful to two excellent Parisian friends who open their arms and apartment
during the “gilets jaunes” and strike-ridden Parisian Fall of 2019. Gloria Origgi, who
tolerated my presence as a “co-loc” in her rather paradisiac apartment “porte d’enfer” in
Montparnasse. Noga Arikha for her constant encouragements, inexorable enthusiasm,
and help in pointing out research references and theoretical writings on time that
I ignored or overlooked. My appreciation also to Routledge, in particular, my publisher
Helen Pritt who welcomed this project with unusual warmth and professionalism.

Introduction
Human Time

Our issue with time is not just that it is relative, or that it passes too quickly or too slow.
It is that it is finite. All of us know it as an absolute and inescapable truth. Time has an
arrow pointing towards an absolute end. For this, time touches to the heart of human
metaphysics. If we are mortal like any other living creatures, our main difference is that
we know it. Self-conscious and mortality-aware creatures, we are endowed with the
unique capacity to reflect upon ourselves as an object of contemplation and evaluation.
All humans are self-conscious in time.
Being self-conscious in time is both the blessing and the unfathomable curse of our
species. It is a blessing because we inherited a mind that is uniquely creative, endowed
with the infinite power of imagination, the power to generate dreams and ideas driven
by logic and recursive thinking. The human mind is distinctively symbolic. It allows for
the exploration and construal of worlds we create and form perspectives that only exist
in our head. We are able to travel back in time and foresee complex outcomes in the far
future. It is the source of art and beauty, but also unique cruelties and perfection.
The flip side of our self-conscious mind, however, is the curse of knowing that we are
going to die. Mortality awareness is indeed the source of unfathomable conundrums; in
particular, the impossible conundrum of figuring out what it is like to be dead, a
proposition that is unfathomable simply because it is logically impossible, an
oxymoron. This is so simply because we need to exist in order to experience. Dead
people cannot tell us how it feels to feel nothing. The silence of the dead is absolute and
irreversible. A dead silence.
Other animals may experience the loss of other kin when it happens. But as part of the
self-conscious and symbolic species we are, we anticipate loss as the necessary outcome
of our existence as well as of the existence of all other creatures around us. Members of
a distinctly symbolic, self-conscious, and mortalityaware species, we bring the
experience of loss to unique levels of metaphysical fears and concerns. This
fundamentally changes our relation with time compared to other living species.
A distinct feature of being human is indeed to be selfconsciously aware of time as a
limited and unknown living endowment to self and others. Human self-conscious time
is thus finite time. It does not deal with the relative duration of events in a world that
always existed and always will. Our world is not eternal, and we know it. We are the
duration of an event that is aware of itself. Stars and atoms are not. As the great
Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) reflects:
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but
I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which
consumes me, but I am the fire.1
In a few powerful words, Borges expresses the human self-conscious reality of time that
is unique in nature and the focus of this boo

Time and Self-Consciousness

No other creatures ponder time the way we do, more often than not a major source of
stress and existential anxiety. Convincing anecdotal evidence suggest that elephants and
other animals mourn their deaths. We do so too, but in our particularly self-conscious
and symbolic ways that is not the ways of elephants. We do so with an uncanny
anticipation of the future and nostalgic reflections about the past. We certainly share
much with elephants and other creatures, but we are also very different in our self-
reflecting abilities, the symbolic ways we tend to communicate not only to others but
also to ourselves, and all the products of our rambling imagination turned toward
ourselves, forward and backward in time.
Human self-conscious time is mainly about schedule, control, and competition. Waking
up, arriving on time, and catching a train. It is about meeting, coordinating, harvesting,
and planting. But more deeply and metaphysically, it stands for our passing and the
ephemerality of all things. It is about impending death and the desperate creation of
meanings to account for the most unsettling and democratic of all existential truth: we
are all going to die, vanishing from this Earth, leaving all things behind and into
oblivion. Time is the human source of a profound separation anxiety. It is also the
source of perennial narratives of immortality, human metaphysics expressed in all
cultures from time immemorial through recurrent myths and rituals.
As a species, we are the only creatures facing explicitly and conceptually the torturing
conundrum of their own mortality and the ephemerality of all things. What sets us apart
in nature is our self-conscious psychology. We know that we know and that we are the
knower of what we know.
No other animals can engage in seemingly endless recursive thinking. No other animals
either project or share imaginary worlds beyond the one they currently experience. We
are the only one experiencing faith in imaginary worlds, inclined to put our trust and
conviction in heavenly kingdoms, in the spell of ancestors’ spirit, on reincarnation, of
fearing hell, and aspiring to paradise. We are the only ones forced to pound their head
against the logically inconceivable idea of nothingness, that is, something that is not.
How could we have risen into being from nothing? Return to nothing? How can
something be nothing? How can something coming from nothing, return to nothing, and
dissolving back into oblivion “forever,” meaning into something where time is
irrelevant? How can time be irrelevant when it is at the crux of who I am now, for my
time being which will end, no matter what.
Humans are creatures uniquely caught in time because they are uniquely selfconscious.
This idea forces us to think time differently from what is typically proposed by
physicists (e.g., that time is an absolute illusion, does not exist) or by biologists,
neuroscientists, and other psychologists searching for causal mechanisms underlying
some sort of general and absolute time sense that we may or may not share with other
animals.
We know that there is an end to the being of all things, including us. We share the
absolute truth of our own mortality. We carry this truth, implicitly in the way we choose
to act or explicitly in thoughts and words, trying to find ways to assimilate and live with
it.
Condemned to live with the knowledge of our own finitude, we handle this knowledge
with variable degrees of either stoicism, terror, transcendence, and generally with much
denial. It is our curse to try making sense of what will eventually negate what we
embody, what we know, what we are, and all the people we depend on, and with whom
we share the same destiny toward oblivion, which is a compounding curse factor. Our
self-conscious time carries with it the obligatory promise of our own physical
disappearance and the silence that follows of all those disappearing in front of our eyes.
The human curse is that not only are we under the constant necessary spell of losing
oneself but we are also under the spell of losing others. People die around us, before we
do, and coping with absolute and irrevocable separation is our main conundrum: how to
deal with the silence of those gone-gone? Human mortality awareness brings
incomparable anguishes as well as existential helplessness, a harsh price to pay for
being self-conscious.

Evolution and Cosmology

All human societies function around supernatural belief systems in responses to the
conundrums of finitude and mortality. Archeological evidence of burials, cremation,
and defleshed, sometimes painted human bones, indicate that such systems date back at
least 100,000 years in human evolution. Even Homo Neanderthalensis, a human species
extinct some 40,000  years ago, left archeological evidence of burying and decorating
their dead.2
In the stochastic flow of evolution, driven by natural selection since life emerged on this
planet some 4  billion years ago, several kinds of creatures emerged, then disappeared,
replaced, or outlived by other kinds. Our species (Homo Sapiens or modern humans)
emerged only approximately 300K years ago as part of the Homo genus (Hominids).
This represents a minuscule blink of time as the scale of evolution.
The Homo genus branched out less than 2 million years ago from a common ancestor
we shared with apes, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees, in particular, with whom we
also share approximately 96% or our genetic make-up. To give some scale, this
evolution represents only .005% of the time since life appeared on Earth. This
represents a proportion that in statistics is taken to be negligible.
As negligible as it may sound, this Homo blink of evolutionary time brought enormous
qualitative changes in the evolution of cognition. It corresponds to laps of time in which
human’s unique self-conscious and symbolic psychology has emerged, bringing with it
a drastically novel awareness of self and time. The novel cognitive self-awareness
accompanying human evolution is most prominently evident in light of the ratcheting
technological inventions and productions in the evolution of modern humans. This
ratcheting effect accelerated starting some 10,000 years ago, when groups of humans
became sedentary, creating first large cities on the banks of the Tiger and the Euphrates
in Mesopotamia, but also soon after by the Nile and in the Indus valley, developing
agriculture, food storage, and accounting and writing systems. The extent of the human
ratcheting production and invention momentum continues today at the exponential rate
we know, with, for example, the mindboggling explosion of information technology of
the past 2–3 decades. At an always faster rate, our ways of being and cooperating with
one another keep changing with no ceiling for acceleration and with no end in sight.
Since the seminal 18th- and 19th-century works of Lamarck, Wallace, and Darwin, we
know that as a species, like any other species, we evolved from the same process of
natural selection. Nothing more and nothing less. A  species, by definition, has its own
unique and distinctive characteristics. Each expresses particular traits that make them
exceptional in Nature, whether extinct or about to become extinct. All species are
exceptional and unique.
Our uniqueness is self-consciousness and the endowment we evolve to think both
recursively and symbolically. This endowment changed our relation with time in
fundamental ways and in sharp contrast to how time is theorized in physics. The events
and their duration measured in physics are not self-aware, they cannot reflect upon
themselves as they unfold, nor can they think reflectively about them. As humans, we
are a special kind of events in the world. We are selfconscious, and this is a profound
game changer. In relation to time, it forces us to think about it in radically different
ways differently, the intention of this book. There is a specific human psychology of
self and time that we may call the human self-conscious psychology of time.
Cosmologists established that some13.8 billion years ago, a Big Bang cosmic explosion
triggered the expansion of our present universe. But this universe did not originate from
nothing. The world, in a different form, always existed and always will. It has to be
logically construed as eternal, hence timeless. Cosmologist Stephen Hawkins famously
conjectured that prior to the big bang, “time was always reaching closer to nothing, thus
never became nothing.” Undisputed leader of current cosmology, Hawkins concludes
succinctly in one of his last interviews3 : “There was never a Big Bang that produced
something from nothing. It just seemed that way from mankind’s point of perspective.
The boundary condition of the universe . . . is that it has no boundary.” Interestingly,
and somehow conveniently, he also states in the same interview:
Events before the Big Bang are simply not defined, because there’s no way one could
measure what happened at them. Since events before the Big Bang have no
observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that
time began at the Big Bang.

For the world of cosmology and quantum physics, time may be arbitrary or may have
no relevance since it always existed and always will. For the self-conscious entities we
are, however, time is almighty and certainly not either irrelevant or a vacuous illusion.
We know of our looming death and that all things pass. This marks a fundamental
difference between the time of physics and human selfconscious time.
Self-consciousness thus makes all the difference and requires a radically different way
of thinking about time. Self-consciousness is a cardinal mark of our exception that
impacts on how we relate, think, and experience time. It begs the question: what kind of
psychology may derive from it? The book is driven by the idea that exploring the self-
conscious psychology of time reveals much about who we are and what it means to be
human.

Book Organization
The book is divided into three parts composed of chapters organized around the
following questions: What Is Time? (Part 1); What Is a Self-Experience? (Part 2); and
What Is Being in Time? (Part 3). The first part (Time) deals with the issue of time as a
human concept, the way we conceive time as a universal variable, and how we measure
it primarily in spatial terms, all of it while being self-aware of our finite time and
impending absolute spatial and temporal vanishing. The second part (Self) tries to
capture the foundational aspects of human selfconsciousness, focusing on the
developmental origins of subjectivity associated with separation anxiety, narcissism, the
sense of obligation, and guilt. The third part (Self in Time) deals with how we live and
represent our own finitude and the finitude of others, and how we collect and navigate
events in our life, back in time and projected into the future.

Part 1
Time: What is time?

1. What Time is it?

Abstract: Are we talking about the same time when pondering about it? The time of
physics and the time of being cannot be confounded. They are of two kinds that are
incommensurable, that is, “not able to be judged and assessed on the same standard as
something.” Time t of physicists and engineering is not the finite time we experience as
self-conscious beings. One is eternal and universal and the other is necessarily and self-
knowingly ephemeral. They require radically different approaches if we want to seize
their essence.
The time of physics and the time of being cannot be confounded. They are of two
incommensurable kinds, in the literal sense of having “no common basis, measure, or
standard of comparison: utterly disproportionate.”1 The time t that physicists and
engineers factor in their equations to predict and account for physical phenomena is not
the self-conscious time we experience as sentient beings. One is presumed to be
universal and endlessly recurrent, the other is necessarily and self-knowingly unique
and ephemeral. We are interested in the latter—the psychological and existential time
that is in radical contradistinction to physical time. So, what time is it?
The time cosmologists and quantum physicists talk about is not the time that concerns
us, the human self-conscious time of being. We will consider here what these temporal
notions have in common and what make them ontologically different.

Time Controversies
Does time exist? Do we possess a biological clock? How accurate are we in tracking
time and perceiving duration? All these questions are raised by physicists, biologists,
and psychophysicists. What they all have in common is a conception of time that is
somehow objective and normative, a dimension of the world always more precisely
measured with technological progress. A second is a second, ticktock-tick-tock, time
flies and our impression varies depending on circumstances, mental states, or ages. It
passes differently depending on atmospheric pressure and altitude, as well as our speed
says Einstein. By 7 years, children become better at coordinating speed and distance to
anticipate time of arrivals says Piaget. When deprived in darkness and isolation,
experimentally shut off of all typical environmental cues, and based on gut (internal)
feelings, our biological clock adjusts to a 25 instead of a 24-hour cycle, as demonstrated
by pioneer sensory deprivation research in human and other animals, now reported in
any textbook.
Contemporary cosmologists and elementary particle physicists go as far as to claim that
based on their research, time is at best an illusion. It does not exist but in our mind.
Cosmologists like Julian Barbour endorses a theory that gets rid of time all together.
Barbour wrote a book entitled “The End of Time.”2 In this mind-shaking book, Barbour
develops the rather counterintuitive argument that the universe is nothing but an infinite
collection of instantaneous snapshots of the state of the cosmos in its unique,
nonreplicable infinite momentous interactions. These snapshots are discrete and unique
files that defy the commonsensical intuition of time as an arrow of continuous flow
from the past to the present and future. For Barbour, this temporal continuity is nothing
but an illusion when considering the real real of the physical world. Time would be a
trick of our mind that does not capture the true essence of the universe: something static
composed of all its possible states at once, the infinite catalog of probable states frozen
in time. According to the theory, life, i.e., your life, and the life of all that existed and
will exist are part of a timeless universe that Barbour coins “Platonia” for its resonance
with Plato’s view that what we experience is just the shadow of eternal forms. In that
universe, time is just the figment of our subjective imagination. Accordingly, what we
generally conceive as time is just fictitious, in the same way that we perceive a fictive
apparent motion in two nearby bulbs regularly switching on and off at short intervals.
We see one bulb jumping toward the other location although there is de facto no real
movement. As for apparent motion, time would be a mere illusion.
Trying to conceive an eternal, timeless universe is as counterintuitive as trying to get
along with the flat earth theory. We witness ships disappearing over the horizon and are
all too familiar with satellite pictures of the round blue earth. We experience aging,
witness the passing of events, sunsets and sunrises, we make appointments and try to be
on time, and we perceive the hands of a clock relentlessly moving. The end of time
defies our evidence-based, well-entrenched common sense.
In our mind, time exists, but in what sense and what is it exactly that we perceive? Are
we talking about the time that would exist independently of what we intuitively
construe? Is it comparable to the absolute time Newton posits to predict planetary
movements? Is it a time inseparable from space and relative to the speed, material
density, or mass of an object, as Einstein demonstrated? Or is it the time that others try
to debunk as a fiction, proposing like Barbour that the universe is infinite, eternal,
always existed, and in essence static? A universe with no past and no future, made of an
infinite collection of nows which would render time an irrelevant and obsolete variable,
a pure fantasy of the mind?

Parmenides Versus Heraclitus

The debate between a static and dynamic view on time is as old as Western philosophy,
a debate that even preceded Plato and Socrates (2500  years ago). In the Pre-Socratic
era, Parmenides (early 5th century BC) defended the idea of a timeless and static
universe, movement being accountable as succession of fixed positions, a universe
where everything is described in their various states of immobility. The motionless and
timelessness of Parmenides’ world view is the view of a world that is permanent, a
universe with no future, and no past, a world that is essentially static, where movements
and time are nonexistent, fictions, and false impressions of the mind. In a poem on
Nature, Parmenides learns from a Goddess of two basic ways of learning about the
universe: the way of Truth and the way of Seeming. In this poem, he develops what is
considered the first systematic and sustained logical argument in Western philosophy.
This argument is in defense of the way of Truth which focuses exclusively on “what is,”
in other words on things that are being. The argument eliminates any possibility of
thinking about “what is not,” making a world “that is” the only world that can be
thought of. For Parmenides, the only thinkable world is thus a world that has no origins
in time, a world that is made of invariance and permanence, away from the way of
Seeming which suggests impermanence, changes, and the unthinkable “not being” of
things.
Around the same Pre-Socratic time, Heraclitus (535–475 BC) proposed the exact
opposite view, claiming that all is in motion and that movement is the essence of the
universe. In Heraclitus’ world view, time finds central stage with its arrow, as all things
considered in their constant flux of becoming something else, somewhere else, a world
that is in essence impermanent (panta rhei in ancient Greek). Among his most famous
quotes are: “everything flows” and “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” For
Heraclitus, the universe is about its becoming and the unfolding of a future. It does give
time its arrow.
The essence of Heraclitus’ view on movement and the impermanence of all things, his
panta rhei doctrine, is best summarized by classicist John Burnet (1863–1928):
Fire burns continuously and without interruption. It is always consuming fuel and
always liberating smoke. Everything is either mounting upwards to serve as fuel, or
sinking downwards after having nourished the flame. It follows that the whole of reality
is like an ever-flowing stream, and that nothing is ever at rest for a moment. The
substance of the things we see is in constant change. Even as we look at them, some of
the stuff of which they are composed has already passed into something else, while
fresh stuff has come into them from another source. This is usually summed up,
appropriately enough, in the phrase “All things are flowing” (panta rei).3

Parmenides and Heraclitus’ clash of world views dating back some 2500 years remains
a central debate in today’s science and philosophy. The debate revolves around the
paradox of permanence and change: how to find immutable laws of regularity in a world
of changes, and how to capture changes in a world made of invariant laws? This
question is alive in all scientific and human science domains. In psychology, for
example, the nature–nurture controversy echoes such debate: Are the universal and
domain general laws of psychological development above and beyond interindividual
variations? Or are those variations more than noises, revealing the essence of what we
are as functioning and developing psychological entities, always changing and never
identical? The debate on the paradox of permanence and change opened by Parmenides
and Heraclitus is now perennial, alive in all research domains: in physics in relation to
time; in psychology in relation to development; in history, economics, or the political
sciences in relation to the issue of predictability and reproducibility of events over time.
At stake is always the issue of dosing permanence in impermanence, and inversely, the
description of the world as half full or half empty of immutable laws and regularities.

Time of Physics

Theoretical physicists aspire to account for the microscopic and macroscopic physical
realities with the simplest possible equation. A few symbol equation like Einstein’s
second law of relativity that captures something immutable about the universe, its
origins and essential building blocks. The genius of Einstein is to have succeeded in by-
passing Parmenides “way of seeming” that was the commonsense Galilean and
Newtonian view on an absolute physical time. Einstein debunked this notion by proving
its relativity, the fact, for example, that time flows at different absolute rates depending
on altitude. He demonstrated that the flow of absolute physical time depends on
distance, mass, the electromagnetic nature of space, and the absolute maximum speed of
light (300,000 km/sec). His demonstration forced a new conception of time as a time
relative to space, considered an immutable law of nature, nature being the real real and
not the real as it appears through the mind’s eyes compelling us to construe time as an
immutable flow, the constant factor t Newton entered in his equations about the
movements of celestial bodies. Einstein’s new law will of course remain valid until
further debunking by future research. That is the way of science, progressing toward
better approximations and probabilities of a truth, always opening new questions, ad
infinitum, reflection of a universe that we know was there before us and will continue to
be after we pass. It is a universe (the real real) that we have to assume exists
independent of whatever our mind construes. It is both infinite and eternal in
comparison to our finite subjective experience of being. That is the world of physics in
which physical time is theorized as objectively as possible following the precepts of the
scientific method.
Einstein’s relativity theory debunked time as the variable implicitly factored by Galileo,
becoming an absolute factor in Newtonian physics. But if theories of contemporary
physics posit time at microscopic (quantum theories) and cosmic levels as irrelevant,
illusory, and hence not properly existing, what about my very limited and fast running
time on this Earth? Could it also be deconstructed to become unequivocally relative, if
not irrelevant and nonexistent? How would that help me to live and joyfully ride the
inescapable entropy of my life? What time are we talking about? What time is it?
The rushing of the sand through the neck of the hourglass renders visible something that
is not directly accessible to our senses, and primarily the force of gravity. Gravity
reveals itself to us, in the same way that a flapping sail renders visible changes in
atmospheric pressure that cannot be directly perceived by us without some
measurements and inference from the systematic movement of things. Wind and gravity
are both revealed to our senses by their effects on things. We do not see wind or gravity
directly, like I do not see time directly while staring at the hourglass. We don’t see the
wind, we see trees bending and water falling, nor do we perceive gravity. These forces
are inferred from their manifestations. It is the role of meteorology and physics, as
sciences, to come up with systematic ways of measuring, describing, and eventually
explaining such forces above and beyond what meets our senses. Another way to put it
is that wind and gravity choreograph a ballet of movements and events. The dancers are
the discrete entities moved by these forces: the bending of trees, the flapping of sails, or
the grains of sand rushing through the hourglass. The movement of these things are just
manifestations of these invisible forces from which they can be measured and inferred
above and beyond the limits of our perception. In the same way, invisible cosmic
worlds are inferred from the manifestation of particular frequency signals picked up by
huge parabolic radio telescopes oriented toward the heavens. We perceive sound
frequency changes, not faraway galaxies. Those are inferred via complex calculations,
measurements, or theoretical speculations that might reveal them to our minds. But are
we inferring time as a general abstraction, or are we instead perceiving discrete events
in how long they last (duration), but also in relation to their discrete intensity or vitality
as they unfold? Are time and duration interchangeable semantically? I  will argue, like
illustrious other before me (i.e., philosopher Henri Bergson), that they are not and that
they tend to be wrongly confounded both in existing theories and in our individual
heads.
Much of what we know or take for granted as trustworthy is not perceived and in some
instances do not even exist. Such is the case of time as when I stare at the hourglass,
I do not see it. I just see the flow of a finite collection of sand particles rushing into the
neck and falling into a perfect Gaussian cone curvature. Comparing the top and bottom
glass bulbs, I might gauge a set duration, when my eggs will be just right, soft and not
too hard, 5 minutes for my taste, not one second more or less. But how does the concept
of time help us to understand the phenomena that can be described in pure spatial
terms? What does time account for and is it real? What if time did only exist in our head
as a necessary illusion? If so, what might be the function and place of time as a
necessary illusion in human psychology and self-understanding?
Current quantum and other gravitational field physicists tell us that the universe is
expanding and that there was an initial big bang. They say that at all scales, from
elementary particles to stars, any physical entities and all living organisms may be
described in universal thermodynamic terms with no need to factor time in this account.
The physics and movements of the whole physical universe and living world can be
described in terms of spontaneous gain and loss of heat, the cosmic breathing of energy
that makes the world go round. It is a world in which everything is in movement and
they interact with everything else. A process by which heat is generated to be lost;
hence, the terms thermo (heat) and dynamic (movement). In plain words, the account of
the universe’s origins and destiny that is currently debated by fundamental physicists is
an account of universal quantum breathing, the breathing of expanding and eventually
also contracting cosmic lungs ad infinitum. The universe we travel with, they say, is
filled with black holes like black spots of low entropy or massive concentration of
energy or mass, ready to explode and expand with dissipation of energy and high
entropy, eventually contracting and returning to low-entropy spots of high energy. That
is the cosmic ballet that both quantum physicists of the infinitely small and
astrophysicists of the infinitely large try to capture in their theories, caught like us for an
instant, with all of our self-consciousness, in the infinite and eternal fireworks of the
universe.
The quantum mechanical account of the universe’s origins is revolutionary and certainly
intriguing, a beautiful theoretical mind game and a monument to human intelligence.
But what does it really have to do with my time experience on this Earth and my own
self-conscious and inescapable entropy? What does it have to do with the unfolding of
my own history and the history of other individuals I live with and may suddenly
witness their vanishing; gone gone? How does quantum physics help us in mourning
and in the face of fateful separation? Those are the existential questions that matter most
and give time a different conceptual spin. Existential time cannot be confounded and
has nothing to do with time physicists are trying to debunk. If time is an illusion, this
illusion is of a profoundly different kind in the physical compared to our existential
selfconscious realm.
My life is unfolding from my self-conscious point of view on the world that includes me
but with the special status that I will soon disappear while the world (the real real
physicists are talking about) will still go on. It will continue to be in the same way that it
was there before I came to life. Our individual self-conscious lives are unique unfolding
stories between two points of unknown distance. Alive, we travel these points, and in
the process, we historicize ourselves as unique entities, accumulating bits and pieces of
memories accumulated like a personal travelogue. This travelogue is the life narrative
we construct for ourselves and especially for others with whom we live and depend
upon to survive, always questing for affiliation and recognition. We do all this with the
uncanny bird’s eye view of self-consciousness, the awareness of one’s own finitude, and
the inevitable ending of all things.
The pulsing and breathing of a universe that always existed and always will, a universe
among other infinite number of universes, with more low entropy creations (black
holes) and infinite big bangs, how do all these extraordinary findings and physical
accounts help us finding our place in that universe as self-conscious entities? How
should we make sense and assimilate such grandiose accounts in our self-conscious
sphere? That is the inescapable existential question imposed equally to all of us self-
aware creatures, the lucky, the wrecked, and the meek, whether you spend your life in
hard labor or sipping champagne on the upperclass deck.
If the eternal laws of physics are the great equalizer of the physical world, finite time is
the great equalizer of the self-conscious universe of ours. However, the laws of physics
are incommensurable with what governs self-consciousness and mortality awareness.
The demonstration that all things obey to the second law of thermodynamics by which
energy dissipates one way, from hot to cold and never the reverse, is at best a
euphemism, a mild substitution from the perspective or our own rational and subjective
experience of being for an absolutely limited time. In the literal sense, the second law of
thermodynamics, is nothing but a mild descriptive substitution of the harsher reality of
what is our own finitude.4 The real real world of physics is not aware of itself, nor of its
laws.
Physical accounts, as accurate as they may be, do not illuminate nor provide much
enlightenment on what it means to be mortality aware; it does not help in figuring out
how to assimilate the existential reality of one’s own and others’ inescapable mortal
destiny. No light and no comfort in the kind of cosmology that contemporary physicists
are arguing about in the wake of Einstein’s breakthrough, just intellectual teases. They
may be as helpful as rearranging chairs on the deck of a sinking ship. It does not help
much to alleviate human finite time awareness and associated unfathomable angsts. So,
what time is it? The time of Newton, Einstein, and other Quantum physicists? Or are we
talking about your time and my time being, our finite time? For quantum physicists, and
since Einstein, time is relative to mass (the density of whatever matter constitute a
body), but also distance and speed. Contrary to what Newton conjectured, there is no
absolute time, nor is there any rectilinear fixed space as Newton conjectured in his own
revolutionary account a few centuries prior. As we know, Einstein’s revolutionized
physics and cosmology by altering fundamentally the premise of Newton’s own
gravitational account of why celestial bodies move the way they do in relation to each
other. Newton’s theory, however, continues to be a remarkably accurate system of
predictions at the scale of our own solar system (e.g., tide schedule) but not at the scale
of the whole universe with its infinite number of galaxies surrounding the infinitely
small specks of all the planets I see from my roof at night.

Time and Finitude

Who does not feel dizzy trying to compute all the information gathered not only by
astrophysicists looking at bodies in the macro space, but also by physicists smashing
elementary particles propelled at the speed of light in large circular magnetic tunnels to
discover more infinitesimally subatomic galaxies? Selfconscious mortals, what do we
make of all this?
The awe and curiosity for those theoretical descriptions of the universe that we travel
with does not medicate the creepy vertigo engendered by these accounts. Cogent
scientific approximations of truth about the real real physical world are at best
temporary reprieve and distractors from an existence that is knowingly doomed with the
necessary specter of absolute severance from all things, including the self—the
scandalous and impossible self-conscious conundrum of our species.
Time is real and does exist at my existential scale. We all know about our limited time
being. The arrow of time is real and irreversible in our lives: there is a future that
becomes actualized to vanish into vague memory traces from which we extrapolate our
identity, tell stories about ourselves, and control our selfconscious presentation to the
world.
In the real real physical world, either microscopic (quantic) or macroscopic (cosmic),
there is entropy and lower entropy creation in observed black holes where matter
contracts to become pure energy allowing novel dissipation movement, regeneration of
novel entropy, ad infinitum. That is the real real all mighty mysterious and eternal
quantum and cosmic breathing accounted by contemporary cosmologists and
elementary particle physicists, the way God ultimately created things from cycles of
always and infinitely recurring low to high states of entropy.
In sharp contrast, in our real real self-conscious world, there is absolute and ultimate
dissolution following entropy of our being, whereby we psychologically and
existentially vanish by dying, with only others that will survive us for the limited time
of their own existence. That is our absolute difference between the real real of our
embodied world of being and the real real cosmic and microscopic world accounted by
physicists in which time may be reconsidered, even obliterated since this world always
existed and always will. The truth is that we are temporary pop out vessels in the world
of physics that is eternal. We are just passing through like anything else furnishing that
eternal world. As self-conscious entities, we are condemned to spend our endowment of
limited energy for our limited time being, until spent from high to low and zero
concentration. That is the necessary law of universal destiny of all things furnishing the
world of physics, including us uniquely self-conscious entities who have to compose
with such doomed destiny like no other entities in the known universe.
In our self-conscious mind, time has an arrow and it absolutely kills us. In radical
contradistinction, physicists now tend to construe time as relative, if not fictitious, in
itself a useless factor and an illusion in reference to the eternal real real universe of
physics. Time loses its arrow in a universe that always breathed, with endless renewed
concentration and dilation of energy following the laws of thermodynamics. God “the
Eternal” does not need to wear a wristwatch. Time pressure has no place in a world of
eternity. It is on us, self-conscious and mortality-aware creatures.
Time gains almighty relevance in our awareness of inescapable and absolute finitude.
Yet, how do we construe time in the context of our finite existence? Could it also just be
an illusory mental construct? A necessary trick of our fertile imagination? The fact is
that we do not perceive time directly. Staring at the hourglass, I do not see time, I am
inferring it. We witness the passing of things and people, yet they also continue to exist
in memory and imagination. How could something exist if not perceived directly? Is
time just a mirage? Time may be a necessary illusion of our mind, at par with the
concepts of number and causality that we may infer without perceiving them directly.
These issues are discussed in the next chapter (Time Illusion).

2 TIME ILLUSION

Abstract: Is there a perceptual reality of time? When I look at the hourglass, I do not see
time, I just infer it. Literally, what I see in a noninferential way is a dynamic event flow
that unfolds in space, the sand particles rushing under the invisible force of gravity.
I see the duration and agitation of this flow from beginning to end. From it, I may infer
time like I may infer gravity or quantity. But those are in essence mental constructs, the
products of my imagination, not the direct product of what impinges on my senses. To
that extent, time is more illusory than real. What is real about time, however, is that for
us it is finite. That is real real.

Time has no relevance in light of the fact that the world may have always existed and
always will. In such timeless and infinite universe, all its constitutive elements are
caught in a constant flux of stochastic interactions. Based on such basic premise, each
instant in the eternal and infinite universe may be described as a particular and unique
spatial configuration of all things coexisting at a particular snapshot instant of that
universe. For physics theorists like Julian Barbour, such infinite collections of unique
instants would constitute the real real of the universe that in essence would be timeless;
a universe where time has no relevance and may be relegated to pure illusion, mere
product of the seeming ways of our mind.

Timeless World
As briefly alluded in the preceding chapter, in his timeless/eternal cosmology, Barbour
coins this world as Platonia. It is a universe that is made of the infinite catalog of all
snapshot moments of interaction among all the things that compose it. Accordingly, the
succession of snapshot configurations creates a path in Platonia that is the universe’s
history. The history of the universe would thus unfold as a succession of spatial
configuration that is sufficient to account for the real real without necessary appeal to
either time or movement. In Barbour’s Platonia, time and movement are inexistent.
Place would replace time: “the universe is treated as a single whole and time is reduced
to change” (change of place and configuration of things constituting the universe). With
such conjecture, time disappears, relegated to the illusory mind’s way of seeming. It is
“the end of time,” announced by the title of Barbour’s 1999 book, in the same way that
Nietzsche announced that “God is dead.” In his proposed theory, Barbour announces the
death of Chronos, personification of time in ancient Greek mythology.
In a way, Barbour’s and other physicists’ views on cosmology do not kill time as a
notion, but revise it in the way it is construed. Progress in modern physics since Einstein
shows that the passage of time is not uniform but rather elastic and relative. Complex
experiments proved correct the counterintuitive notion that the pace of a clock’s hands
does vary depending on the relative speed and altitude of the clock in space. The hands
of a clock do not move at the same pace on Mars, on the Himalaya, by the dead sea or
placed in a vessel traveling at great velocity across the cosmos toward faraway galaxies.
Such demonstration revolutionized the Newtonian views on time which help predicting
the relative movements of nearby celestial bodies, as well as being on time to catch a
train, all of it based on an absolute time scale and invariant t factor. Einstein and his
successors proved time invariance wrong, when thought of at cosmic and microscopic
scales not at the scale of us as living thinking entities.
With Einstein, time became space–time. At the scale of the infinite universe, Einstein
relativity theory toppled the Newtonian view on time as a uniform and invariant flow in
which discrete events unfold. This view dominated the world of physics for three
centuries. In Newtonian mechanics, time and its flow are construed as an absolute
passage, like the seeming way of our mind’s eye staring at the hourglass. Until Einstein,
time was nothing but a continuous and objectively constant flow, regardless of how
such flow may be measured, rhythmical celestial changes or counting mechanical tick-
tock movements. For ages, humans successfully figured ways to navigate the world
looking at celestial movements in the sky, measuring the flow of currents, and
observing the continuous motion of the moon in relation to the earth to predict precisely
sea tides, with all the appropriate corrections for long-range predictions. Newtonian
time is indeed good enough to account for much of our being. It is practically and
subjectively relevant, helpful for us to do what we need in order to survive, adapt, and
coexist with others.
Astrophysicists with their instruments allowing faraway perceptions at the unimaginable
scale of the universe and its zillions of galaxies, did manage to debunk the shortsighted,
yet highly intuitive and efficient Newtonian notion of absolute time. Since Einstein, this
notion lost its ontological foundation, at least in the realm of physics and cosmology,
proven not fit to account for the real real physical universe.
At the large galactic scale of the universe, Einstein demonstrated that the flow of time is
objectively relative to one observer’s state of motion (his speed) and his location in
space, which by the way happened to be curved because of its electromagnetic nature,
not the Euclidian three-dimensional (3D) space in which location is reduced to a x, y, z
coordinate. This is what has been taught in schools for centuries, and continues to be
successfully taught because, at our scale, it is a valid and practical way of construing the
world. However, it does not apply if one wants to account for the real real nature of the
universe. Einstein’s 4D space–time representation of the universe relegated the
Newtonian notion of an absolute and separate time to the rank of practically useful
illusion. Einstein’s relativity theory also reveals how much the Newtonian notion of
absolute time is more in resonance with our self-conscious existence, the practical and
commonsensical scale of our mortality-aware subjective world. Einstein’s relativity
does have dizzying relevance in the quest for the metaphysical nature of the real real,
little relevance at our existential scale. At the existential self-conscious scale of ours,
time is absolute, standing for the unstoppable passage of the finite events in our life.
What is relative is the feeling experience of the duration of unfolding events, not time
which flows relentlessly and continuously as we stare at the hourglass. So what time is
it from an existential standpoint?
Time is said to go fast or to go slow, but does it really at our scale which is closer to the
scale of the universe predicted by Galileo and Newton, mainly within the limits of the
solar system, a good enough scale for our adapted way of life on earth. The solar system
is the scale of our basic survival. It is the scale of ocean tide schedules and seasonal
current shifts used by fishermen, not of light traveling in a curved space at
300,000 km/second. The scale at which time finds for us existential relevance is not the
scale of zillions of galaxies in an infinite electromagnetic space–time universe, time
relative at best, or even inexistent following Barbour’s and other quantum physics
conjectures. Such scales are no real help in figuring the kind of time we are referring to
at the scale of our own selfconscious embodied finite existence, caught between an
absolute beginning and an absolute end. In that regard, our existential real real frame of
reference is indeed more in alignment with an absolutist, Newtonian’s view on time
with its resolute and regular arrow movement from the past to future.
What is more in alignment with Einstein’s relative time view is, however, our
experience of duration which varies depending on situations and depends on our current
frame of reference, whether, for example, we are intensely immersed in a book or bored
waiting for an appointment. Time referred as duration becomes relative in its
experience, elastic, and even sometimes giving the subjective impression of vanishing
under the spell of strong emotions. Events can unfold in slow motion during an accident
or accelerate while escaping a predator. Our subjective experience of time as duration
does fit Einstein’s relativistic view.
We know that we are going to die and that all things have an end, except maybe for the
universe itself. However, does that make time a necessary category of the universe, or is
it just a made-up category of our angst filled self-conscious mind? Psychologically, like
in the static world of Platonia, could time as an absolute existential flow also be an
illusion? Something analogous to the apparent motion we are forced to perceive when
presented with two alternating stationary lights? In other words, could time be the
product of our mind’s way of seeming rather than the way of Truth that Parmenides said
in his poem learned from the Goddess?
These are difficult and fundamental questions that require first and foremost, a clear
semantic distinction between what we mean by time as opposed to duration. For this,
and to eliminate any inadvertent misunderstanding, we need to go back to the English
dictionary.

Time Versus Duration

In its most generic sense, time is defined as “the system of those sequential relations
that any event has to any other, as past, present, of future; indefinite and continuous
duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another.” In contrast, duration
refers to “the length of time something continues or exists.” If we follow these
definitions, we can see that what we mean by time is something that refers to the ordinal
succession of events from the past to future. By duration, we mean the relative expand
of a particular individuated event. Specifically, time as a concept word in English,
captures the ordinal aspect of events as they unfold in their existence. Duration, in
contrast, captures the cardinal aspect of one particular, individuated event. By analogy,
the same fundamental conceptual distinction applies in the realm of numbers. Any
number as a concept articulates on one hand, a logically necessary ordinal aspect (e.g.,
number 3 is larger than 2 and smaller than 4), and on the other, the cardinal aspect
represented by that number in particular (e.g., “three-ness” of number 3).
The cardinal aspect of an event (its duration), as for number (e.g., the threeness of 3), is
essentially in the eyes of the beholder. Your sense of what “threeness” is for you is
probably not what “three-ness” is for me. Likewise, waiting an hour in a line to get a
ticket is probably not experienced in the same way for you and me, all depending on our
individual circumstances and personalities. In that respect, abiding to our definition,
duration is in essence relative.
As for numbers, the ordinal aspect of events (time), on the contrary, is absolute. It is not
just in the eyes of the beholder, dictated by a logical necessity that is in essence
absolute, like our self-conscious sense of finitude and our mortality awareness. Yet,
does the necessary ordinal logic of time makes it more real than duration, the latter in
essence more relative and subjective? We can argue that time as an ordinal concept is
more abstract and removed from our experiential presence in the world, away from
Heidegger’s “Dasein” and cardinal feeling of duration. If we abide to its literal
dictionary meaning, time is the pure product of a cognitive inference not a percept
proper. The inverse would be true for duration which is properly perceived and
experienced.
To the extent that time is, by definition, primarily the product of the logical inference of
the ordinal order of events as they unfold following the unidirectional arrow of past to
future, it can be considered as an abstract invariant feature of the environment, the
product of our mind and not a real real entity of the world or something that would exist
in independence of our mind’s work and resulting ways of seeming. This is a basic
epistemological distinction.
The argument that duration is the real real of our temporal experience, not time, is
supported by the fact that when I look at the hourglass, I do not see time which is
nothing but a necessary abstraction, hence an illusion, albeit, a necessary illusion.
Looking at the hourglass, what I see directly, in a noninferential way, is a dynamic
event flow that unfolds in space, sand particles rushing under the invisible force of
gravity. I see and experience the duration of this flow from beginning to end. From it,
I may infer time as well as gravity, but those are in essence mental constructs, indirect
products of my mind, not the direct products of what impinges on my senses. Arguably,
and in the footsteps of continental French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941),
duration rests primarily on intuition, not reason. When eventually measured and
compared, duration becomes the secondary abstraction we call time, referring to
duration not as experience, but in objective, quantifiable, and ordinal terms (micro
seconds, minutes, hours, decades, centuries, eras).
Bergson opposed the process of intuition to pure reasoning. Intuition, for Bergson,
seizes at once the indivisible and constantly changing facets of reality, that is the
phenomenal property of duration as opposed to time. Reason, on the contrary, parses
reality into discrete fixed (immobile) objects of reflection clumped together to form
mental categories such as time, a fixed abstract ordinal concept represented in spatial
and causal terms (e.g., the regular movement of the hand clocks caused by the winding
spring and escapement mechanism).
As we will see, time is never measured other than in spatial terms. Duration on the other
hand, pertains to the fluidity of changes over time as they happen. It captures the direct
experience of movement flux and temporal fluidity characterizing duration, the opposite
of time as necessary ordinal rules in the sequencing of events along the arrow of past to
future. In this framework, duration is directly perceived. Time is not, as it is only the
product of an indirect ordinal measurement and ranking, the logical reconstruction of
event succession. Duration is movement impinging upon our senses, like the rush of
sand in the hourglass. We perceive duration, not time. In this proposed theoretical
context, time perception is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms! Talking of duration
perception makes more theoretical sense, albeit rarely used by those writing about the
psychology of time.
For Bergson, the intuition of duration leads to the inner being of what moves nature in
general, the vital momentum (élan vital) expressed in all existing things caught in the
movement of entropy and evolution, the force that is behind the movement of all things
in the universe. Bergson’s views align with those of Heraclitus on a universe made of
constant motions and changes, that we never step twice in the same river.
In short, it is necessary to posit time and event duration, as two ontologically different
things from a conceptual and experiential (phenomenal) standpoint. Each refers to two
fundamentally different kinds of processing, one that is inferred and anchored in our
mind as a necessary illusion (time) arranged along an irreversible sequential order (the
past to future arrow). The other (duration) is anchored in the reality of the temporal flow
accompanying any event, punctuated or not by a beginning and an end. The experience
of duration is relative like in Einstein’s theory. Time experience would be absolute like
in Newton’s views.
With this distinction in mind, Chronos, the mythical God of the Titans in Greek
mythology, armed with the sickle that will kill us all, and contrary to what is commonly
thought, would symbolize duration, not time. Chronos is the God of the ephemeral
lasting of all things, not the logical order (the ordinal as opposed to the cardinal
dimension) of events along an irreversible arrow from the past to future and through an
elusive present, as we will see. The God of Time is the river that Heraclitus uses as
metaphor for a world where all things are in motion, a universe where movement is of
the essence. A world also where the mind can extract and reconstruct order at a
conceptual level, an order that exists in the eye of the beholder, not in the real real that
we perceive. Once again, what we perceive are events and their relative duration as they
unfold, like the rushing of sand particles in the hourglass I am starring at. We can also
anticipate and reconstruct in our mind the order of this flow once it happened and as it is
happening. However, what we experience is the flow that we perceive as duration, not
the reconstructed or anticipated order of events we infer from such perception. This
inference (time) belongs to the mind of the beholder, and as we will see, is confounded
with space when it comes to represent and measure duration as time (e.g., the moving
hands of a circular clock, their regular movement on a quadrant). As Bergson writes:
“When we want to have an idea of time that is distinct from duration, we fall back on
space.” The essence of time is, for Bergson, captured in the permanent growth and
diminution of movements (vital forces for the philosopher) that are sensed and directly
experienced in terms of duration and relative vitality, not rationalized and conceived
like we typically understand the psychology of time.
If we accept this distinction, then time is indeed an illusion to the extent that it refers to
something inferred, hence an indirect capture, a ghostly mental representation of a
spatial transformation perceived as duration (i.e., the change in the = spatial location of
the sand particles rushing through the hourglass). It is a ghostly representation because
starring at the hourglass I do not see time, directly. I infer it. What I see directly is
movement in space, the spatial transformation of particles rushing through it, with a
particular dynamic signature. I see the dynamic flow and the quality of its dynamic
signature: the perception of a more or less animated flow, more or less fast or slow
unfolding of events.

Time Concept

Time is a representation of this dynamic flow, in particular its temporal order. It exists
in our mind as a reconstruction. It is an illusion not because it is false or unrealistic, but
because it is a mental representation of something that does not exist in independence of
the inner working of our mind, it is a simulation and an imaginary reconstruction of a
property that does not belong to the real real physical world. In other words, it is a
deduction of our mind, an indirect inference, and not something that properly exists in
the real real. Time is not an experience proper.
In contrast, spatial transformations do happen and exist literally in the real physical
world that we sense directly. Duration is perceived as the pace at which spatial events
unfold, their relative animacy and dynamic envelop their qualitative granular texture or
frequency. Duration refers to all these temporal qualities, how rushed and agitated sand
particles rush through the hourglass, pushed by gravity at various paces depending on
the encumbrance at the neck and the mass of each particle, and their relative granularity.
Duration refers to the experience of events as they unfold and present themselves to our
senses. For the same objective length of time, duration goes by fast or slow. One hour
can be experienced very differently whether we are deeply immersed in an activity or
impatiently waiting for a late appointment. Yet, it is objectively the same time.
Duration, pertains to the subjective impression of the passage or event flow, its
particular signature of pace, frequency, and dynamic or “vitality” envelop. Regardless
of time and its orderly constant in reference to an irreversible arrow, the duration of the
hand on my clock that captures seconds is faster than the one that captures minutes.
Looking at them, I perceive duration and not time. I perceive the quality of a flow
dynamic that exists in independence of any ordinal inference and objective
measurements of elapsed time. This distinction is fundamental as it points to the radical
opposition between the duration of existence (existential or phenomenal time) and the
time of physics (physical or objective time).
Coming back to the analogy with number, the concept of time and the temporal flow it
tries to capture articulates two fundamental aspects, one that is in essence qualitative
and the other that is logical and quantitative. The qualitative aspect is the cardinality of
a particular duration of any event one might experience (a wait, a wake, a vacation, a
day at work, a season, a recess, etc.). It is the same as the cardinality of a particular
number (three-ness, ten-ness, one million-ness, etc.). The cardinal aspect of any
concept, such as time or number, is in essence impressionistic and intuitive. The
cardinal aspect of number 3 can be represented in infinite ways: the numeral “3”; three
dots, three cows, three cars, three mountains, a succession of three beats, three short
flashes of lights in the dark, etc. We extract the “three-ness” of 3 regardless of temporal
and figural variations. Furthermore, the “three-ness” of 3 has a different meaning when
placed in front of six zeros or representing three battalions of 10,000 soldiers. As for all
numbers, the cardinal aspect of number 3 is indeed contextual and in essence
impressionistic as it relates to the contextual relevance of such number (wealth
management or war). The same applies for duration in relation to the concept of time.
Each duration has its cardinal stamp in terms of its perceived temporal flow: shorter,
longer, faster, and slower in comparison to the duration of other events or the same
event reproduced over time. A movie might seem short at first viewing, much longer
when watched a second time. The perceived duration of the same event may greatly
vary depending on stress, emotions, or attention, whether it is highly predictable and
boring, or on the contrary loaded with unexpected outcomes and novelty as in a
suspense movie. In short, the cardinal aspect of duration is relative, elastic. It is
fundamentally subjective, capturing the qualitative dimension of time; here considered
as duration following Bergson’s premise which captures something distinct and
important. The cardinal aspect of time is what is commonly—and wrongly, we think—
referred to as time perception, felt time, or subjective time. In fact, our subjectivity
pertains to duration, not time.
As for numbers, the ordinal aspect of our concept of time is the absolute rule of
succession that we extract in the successive flow of events, along the irreversible arrow
from the past to future, each unfolding like any narrative with a necessary beginning
and a necessary end. This necessary order in all temporal events represents the other,
“colder” and more logical quantitative aspect articulated in the concept of time, in
conjunction with the “warmer” and qualitative aspect that is duration. These two aspects
are inseparable, yet dissociable, each forming one side of the same concept, like the two
sides of a coin.
As mentioned earlier, Bergson treated our perception of duration, the flow of events as
they unfold in congruence with Heraclitus’ image of the ever-changing flow of a river.
He conjectured that duration perception corresponds to the direct impression of the vital
momentum that is pervasive in all things that exist in Nature. We live, we die, we decay,
we develop, we evolve, we vanish, physically transmuted into other forms of energy
like fossil fuel, heat, ashes, gas in the atmosphere, and food for the worms. In our
perception of duration, we would directly capture the essence of such a temporal
dynamic which stands for the temporal flow of all things toward entropy (from the
Greek “en-” and “tropos-,” turn or turning). In other words, there is a transcendental
dimension to the perception of duration as it would directly capture the “inside
movement of all things.”
There is an interesting parallel between this view of duration perception as the capture
of the inside movement of all things, with what child psychiatrist Daniel Stern coins
“vitality affects” or “vitality contours.” Vitality affects correspond to the qualitative
dynamic or movement stamp that is expressed and that we perceive in the way things
move, and the way we choreograph bodily movements while expressing emotions and
other mental states, dancing, talking, or playing music. Music does choreograph in
successive sounds and eventually in successive dancing steps a dynamic flow of forms
in terms of relative order and duration. What we perceive is the relative duration of
these forms that correspond to qualitative melody with particular vital contours that map
onto particular moods, emotions. This is what Stern captures as vitality forms of affects.
For each particular beat or syncopation of sounds, there is a particular affective
resonance in the listener, the musician, or the dancer that translates into specific moods,
kinds of movement, or esthetic (empathic) experiences with the piece.
As for the detection of the relative flow of a river depending on whether an upstream
dam is open or close, the expression as well as the detection of vitality affects rest on
the complex perception of relative duration and the relative order in which they unfold.
That is what time may correspond to in our sentient, embodied, and self-conscious
mind. Is it an illusion? Yes, to the extent that it is something that we reconstruct in our
mind, not something that exists independent of such reconstruction. A tall tree falling in
the forest, with nobody to hear its dramatic fall, still moves sudden masses of air as it
actually falls which could have been heard and seen. But there was no sentient witness
of the fall. No one will be scared, because without mind there is no such experience in
the universe. Likewise, without the cardinal movement flow detection and resonance in
terms of duration and the ordinal detection of events that are reconstructed in our mind,
the universe is indeed timeless. The concept of time, like the concept of number, is a
necessary and useful illusion of our mind. Like mirages in the desert, they do not exist
in independence of the mental processes of our mind. Both are mentally real as
representations, but physically unreal. As for number, time is part of our mental
universe, not the physical real real. The same is true when considering what we call the
present moment, or now, discussed in the next chapter.

3 WHAT’S NOW?

Abstract: How do we construe and is there a present moment? In our head, we parse the
temporal flow into things of the past, of the future, and more elusively of the present, or
the “now.” But what do we mean by “now”? Like time, the present is another product of
the mind’s way of seeming, not the way of truth. The present cannot exist in an ever-
changing real real, a universe where all things are in constant flux, the world of
Heraclitus and thermodynamics. What may exist, however, are cardinal “Kairos”
moments we carved out of the dynamic flow of our life events for storage and
rumination. These present moments correspond to punctual, often serendipitous
alignments of perceptions, actions, and ideas. They may embody what we call the
“present” or the “now,” what William James refers as the “specious present.”

We subjectively parse the temporal flow into things of the past, of the future, and more
elusively of the “present.” But how do we define the present? It is evident that we have
some ideas and memories of things that have happened, and other things that did not,
will not, or probably will happen in the future. But what about the present? What do we
mean by it if, on the footsteps of Heraclitus, we assume that all things move and that
contrary to Parmenides’ views, the universe we live in and travel with is not static or
timeless? In other words, what do we mean by the present if all things are in constant
flux?
As a term, the present is singular, both in the sense that it is not plural, but also because
at close inspection, it stands for something that is conceptually weird, if not aberrant.
That of course, unless like Parmenides or Barbour, we have a timeless representation of
the universe.
The dictionary definition of the present carries this ambiguity as it refers to what occurs
at this time, the now or “current” time. But a current is something that moves so the
question is how to parse and fish out the “now” from that current, the current of
Heraclitus’ river? Metaphor aside, “current” refers to the quality of things that are,
literally speaking, “passing in time.” It qualifies an actuality, what is “belonging to the
time actually passing”: the current week, month, year, or whatever unit we want to use
depending on our temporal lens.

Specious Present

In his Principles of Psychology, published over a century ago, William James (1842–
1910) built highly influential views on our psychological apprehensions of time. These
views are built around his idea of the present, in relation to the past and the future, what
he coined as the “specious present.” By specious present, James had in mind a portion
of the temporal flow that is, following the dictionary sense of the adjective,1
“apparently good or right though lacking real merit; superficially pleasing or plausible.
Something that is pleasing to the eyes but deceptive, as in specious arguments.” Indeed,
specious comes from the Latin adjective for fair, good looking, and beautiful.
With his idea of a specious present, James insists on our ways of seeming, rather than
our ways of truth regarding our apprehension of time. In a famous passage, James coins
the specious present as follows:

The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given
as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different
thing from the conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the
name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past—a
recent past—delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the
future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the
past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener
to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder
to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of
the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to
human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present,
the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three . . .
nonentities—the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their
conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of
the specious present.2

For James, apprehending time is nothing but the apprehension of entities that do not
exist. The past is effectively gone, the future effectively not yet being, and the present is
the “conterminous” boundary of these two nonexisting entities. In this view, the present
is a ghost that for whatever reason we apprehend in our way of seeming, and not in any
way of truth. This apprehension is what we perceive as the contiguous bordering of the
past and the future, the elusive conterminous meeting at the end of one (the past), and
the start of the other (the future), that in the real real happens without an intervening
gap. For James, the specious present is the fantasy of this gap that is pleasing to our
mind but, in essence deceptive, not grounded in any way of truth.
At a descriptive level, this view is hard to counter, unless once again, you side with
those who deny the objective reality of time and movement, à la Parmenides or Barbour.
However, what continues to be debated is how and why our focus on the present; what
makes us think of its existence? We talk about living in the “now,” in the present, being
there, Dasein, seizing the day, but what are we talking about? How do we determine
Horace’s admonition to “carpe diem!” (seize the day!), an admonition we try to abide to
as much as we try to abide to “know thy self!”, the abstract admonition of Socrates and
disciples.

Chronos Versus Kairos

In ancient Greek, time as a concept is qualified by two words: Chronos and Kairos,
Kairos captures something that pertains specifically to the present. In Greek mythology,
Chronos on the other hand incarnates the God of the Titans who armed with his sickle
symbolizes the absolute and resolute passage of time, our shared destiny toward aging
and death. Chronos represents the inescapable sequential order or chronology in the
unstoppable passage of time. In contrast, Kairos captures the opportune alignment or
moment for action.
In a seminal book on the origins of European thought on the body and time (among
other things), Richard Onians3 interestingly suggests that the origins of Kairos as a
concept come from the concrete practice of archery and weaving. Kairos in the domain
of archery would stand for the appropriate and precise moment the archer must release
the right amount of tension on the bowstring to launch the arrow in the right orientation,
with enough force to reach and penetrate the target. In the domain of weaving, Kairos is
the precise moment when the warp opens and for the yarn to be thrown from one side to
the other of the weave. Kairos captures such timely and discrete moments, decisive in
archery or weaving, but any other practical endowers that requires skill learning, like
juggling, the delivery of a joke, or performing a surgery requiring momentous and
precise, life or death actions. It provides some means to operationalize the present as the
moment decisive choices are made.
In his 1948 book on Zen in the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel describes a similar
instance of arrested time and reason when the self is abandoned in an action:

The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the
bull’s-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when,
completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his
technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be
attained by any progressive study of the art.

In the realm of clinical psychology, therapists often point to moments of epiphany in

their cure when patient and therapist connect with one single word, one single glance, or
one mutual gaze. In an interview for BBC,4 psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy recalls one
particular Kairos, healing therapeutic moment in his life. He was 17, suffering from
deep depression. In a session, he shared with his therapist his excitement of having
acquired his first car, a Ford Anglia that to this day, he vividly remembers had for plate
number: OBG13. The therapist responded to the young man enthusiastic news by gently
and silently walking to the window to see the car, then coming back to her seat just said:
“Peter, that is a wonderful car.” To this day, Fonagy considers this therapeutic moment
as life changing, the moment he felt utterly understood and acknowledged. In his radio
interview, he recalls this single instance of genuine acknowledgment, this single move
and gesture from his therapist, as an epiphany moment that pulled him out of depression
as a young man, turning his life around.
Daniel Stern, another psychoanalyst, treats more specifically and in more depth such
Kairos moment in psychotherapy. In his 2004 book entitled The Present Moment in
Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, 5 Stern identifies special moments like this as part of
a “now” that is shared in intimate and trustful relationship, ideally in the patient–
therapist relation, but also in every day relationship with others.
Based on his clinical experience, Stern describes the nature and temporal architecture of
the now that he describes and operationalize as “a period of about 3 to 4 seconds.” He
identifies this temporal envelop of the “present moment” as “a natural duration for the
basic grouping process required by the mind to parse events into basic perceptual,
performative, and conscious ensembles.” Stern concludes: “These processes constitute
the present moment.”
The clinical account of what might constitute the present rests on mutualism and
coincidence of minds between a patient and a therapist. But Daniel Stern’s accounts
would also apply to our individual, subjective experience of what might constitutes the
present, beyond mutualism and coincidence of self and others’ mind. Stern suggests that
we, as individual perceivers and actors in our particular environment and everyday
existence, are naturally constrained and inclined to parse the phenomenal experience of
being into basic event units within the particular 3–4 second temporal envelop
constitutive of the “now.” He writes: “Humans appear to be predetermined to apprehend
and parse events into basic present moment units that are the fundamental units for the
comprehension of dynamic experiences arising from self and others” (p. 75, French
Edition, translated by the author).

Reconstructed and Anticipated Present

That brings back to us the issue of attention, the self-reflective focus on the perceptual
flow we experience in our lives as everything move, staring at the hourglass, caught in
the current of Heraclitus’ river. A leaf or a water bug might land on the river allowing
us to focus and track the movement of the current, until it disappears behind a rock or
takes off in the air. We focus on the furtive moments of something that is unstoppable,
only gathering snapshots like the tracking of the water bug drifting by on the river,
persistent image and events stolen from the passage of time. Those are the events we
reconstruct in memory and rerun in the theater of our mind as things of the past, but also
as things we may anticipate in the future.
The present is, once again, something that we actively recreate in our mind. It depends
on mental processes that fix and archive events in memory that can then be played back
and forth in our mind to generate predictions, but also to recount found memories,
moments of epiphany, and connectedness like the Ford Anglia of young Fonagy with its
OBG13 license plate. The question of the present is a question of attentional focus on
the ongoing ceaseless dynamic current of all things. The main function of the mind is to
fix things in order to ponder and anticipate what might come next, as all things move,
nothing in this world is ever still or permanent, except maybe for the universe itself.
In Stern’s phenomenological and clinical analysis of what would constitute the present
moment, the parsing of events in the temporal flow of their happening and the fixing
process of these events would happen within a typical window of 1–10 seconds. This
temporal window would correspond to the subjective experience of what we refer as the
now or present (i.e., William James’ specious present) in the unstoppable dynamic flow
of continuously unfolding events. The parsing and fixing in memory of events would be
what happens during this window of experience
The window of the parsing and fixing process of events that we extract and archive
from the unstoppable temporal flow of our being is what the present stands for in our
self-conscious mind. But like time, the present is an illusion to the extent that it is the
product of the mind’s way of seeming, not the way of truth. The present does not exist
in an ever-changing real real that is by definition always on the move. It is a universe
we partake for our time being where all things are in constant flux. Our world is indeed
the world of Heraclitus and thermodynamics, not the static world of Parmenides that
resonate with some of today’s quantum physics theories. As suggested by William
James in his specious account of the present, it is conterminous of something that does
not exist anymore (the past) and did not happen yet (the future); therefore, something
that by deduction cannot exist but in the mind of the beholder, in particular, our
selfconscious mind.

Subjective Reality of the Present

In our mind, however, the present is a real phenomenon, as real as placebo effects are,
indeed real and measurable phenomena. It is not because the present is logically
implausible, specious at best in the constant flux of things, that the present does not
carry great relevance in our experience of being. This relevance is evident in the
recognizable and memorized Kairos moments of our existence, the moments of
attentional coincidence and alignment leading to what we often experience as
epiphanies or focal “power” moments of intense mental clarity. Kairos moments
embody our subjective sense of the present. It is a psychological, mentally created
present that has central existential relevance in our self-conscious mind. It is a present
made of nothing but focal moments of particular alignment in our mind and with the
mind of others. It is the memorable alignment of our senses with an object, a face, a
vista, a melody, an idea, a sentence. It is also the furtive moments of mutual alignment
between us and others in which we feel trusted and loved, but also eventually aggressed,
humiliated, betrayed, or rejected. The present is made of these Kairos moments of our
subjective and self-conscious life. They might be an illusion, their “real” relevance
restricted to the confine of our self-conscious mind, but they do play a central role in
our subjective experience of being in general. They guide our sentient existence. Kairos
moments of focal attention and mutual resonance represent what we may construe as the
real present, in opposition to James’ specious present account. As such, rather than
specious, it is a present that has a central relevance in our experience of being, as
particular instances of resonance between self and world. From an existential and
phenomenal/subjective perspective, the present is the possibility of Kairos moments,
discrete moments of resonance that articulate and give direction to our lives.
For bullfight aficionados, there is one ultimate, “magical” moment called the temple.
The term comes from the Spanish verb “templar,” to calm or to temper. In this ancestral
and highly codified, albeit highly controversial practice, there are peak moments when
the matador manages to synchronize perfectly the movement of his cape (muleta), with
the rhythm of the bull’s ferocious charges. The temple captures the prize moment in a
bullfight. It is considered a summum bonum of esthetic intensity in the deadly, clearly
unbalanced fight between man and bull, the former nonetheless putting his or her life on
the line. Temple moments in a corrida are described as timeless, when time is suspended
and clocks are said to stop. Passionate defender and connoisseur of corrida, French
philosopher Francis Wolff writes in in his book on the philosophy of bullfight6 :

Suppose just for an instant that suddenly, nothing change anymore in the surrounding
world (a sort of sudden and absolute “glaciation”) and that in particular nothing change
in you, not even your state of consciousness. . .: there would be no more feeling of time.
That is what would correspond to moments of temple, when the torero manages to slow
down the deadly charge of the bull by luring it with choreographed elegance through his
cape (muleta). Reaching the lure, the bull’s charge is swallowed, inhaled, absorbed,
cushioned, and it is the thin material of the muleta, robing the vigor from the
movement . . . by inversion of its natural process: the acceleration transformed in its
inverse, the slowing down. . . . Time thus “stopped.” It did not just slow down, since the
initial, ineluctable and natural tempo of the bull’s charge was predictably of a vital
acceleration. The temple can stop our own vital clock, when it reverses for us the
ineluctable and natural acceleration of the bull’s charge. (Wolff, 2007, pp. 54–55;
translated from French by the author)

In total absorption and resonance with the unfolding of an emotionally charged event,
past and future vanish. Time is suspended, stamped out for an experience of what seems
a timeless present moment. The temple of corrida would be one of those moments of
timelessness.

Furtive Resonance

The subjectivity surrounding what we construe in our mind as the present moment
brings forth the concept of resonance discussed by sociologist Hartmut Rosa in a recent
book.7 Rosa revives the concept of resonance to analyze accelerating changes in our
late modern societies, a topic of a preceding book on modernity around the concept of
Social Acceleration, 8 by which the pace of life and production in society tends to
increase exponentially. In his book on such societal acceleration, Rosa eloquently
demonstrates what he sees as the “shrinking of the present” in our current world. This
shrinking happens at the level of technology with always faster machines, the pace of
social transformations with global social medias, and the accelerated pace of life in
general. This global trend leads to an inflation of stressful demands placed on the
individuals of late modern industrial societies. In his follow-up 2019 book, Rosa
proposes that resonance is the ultimate “redeeming” process sought after by us trapped
in living pace acceleration that results in what he describes as the squeezing of the
present, an existence where time and space are collapsing with accelerated means of
transportation carrying an increasing number of people around the world at always
faster pace and frequency. It is the global spatiotemporal collapse afforded by new
technologies that allow us to have simultaneous remote lunches and drinks overriding
time zones and vast distances that took weeks, if not months to travel only two centuries
ago.
In this fast-changing world, what remains invariant and would be universally cultivated
are moments of resonance (i.e., Kairos moments) that Rosa rightly naturalizes as rooted
in our biology:

Speculative as these reflections on the prenatal origins of human beings’ relationship to

the world may be, they yet plausibly suggest that resonant experiences are not limited to
already formed and developed subjects exploring their surroundings, but rather are
constitutive of that which can later become a subject. At the same time, birth constitutes
an initial radical break in the fundamental resonance that exists between mother and
child. The “suspended state” comes to an abrupt end, as the newborn is directly
subjected to the effects of gravity and the hard, often cold external surfaces of a non-
responsive and non elastic environment. (Rosa, 2019, p. 50)

As we will see in the second part of the book, the need to affiliate and connect with
others is expressed from birth. From the outset, infants universally demonstrate an
attunement and relentless search for interpersonal resonance with familiar caretakers.
They become weary, lose interest, and display negative emotions toward someone who
is not responding with an expected level of contingency (i.e., resonance) in face-to-face
interactions. All of these are well-established evidence pointing to the fact that we are
born seeking affective attunement and connectedness, in other words affective and
emotional resonance with others on whom we depend for our survival. From the get-go
we seek attachment, imprint, maintain, and search for the warmth, comfort, and
recognition in social resonance. It is part of our biological and evolutionary make up.

The Kairos moments of actual resonance that we seem universally to seek and cherish,
may happen within a short and memorable time window; 10 seconds or less for Daniel
Stern following his clinical insights. It would be within this short temporal window that
we experience what we refer as the present, a necessary illusion by which time appears
suspended. Present moments are Kairos moments of furtive resonance, whether it is in
interaction with a person, a piece of music, or a painting. These moments have cardinal
relevance in our lives and may constitute what we understand as the now: the
phenomenal experience of Kairos moments of resonance, or lack thereof, that fix events
in the inexorable passage of our existential time.
Kairos moments do not just stand for blissful instants in our life. They are also
traumatic moments of extreme stress and pains that shape our lives as in the case acute
stress and other accidents that often lead to posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSDs) we
shall discuss in relation to time in a latter chapter (Chapter  14). Those are inversed
Kairos moments with cardinal negative resonance that often have devastating and long-
lasting effects as in the case of traumatic events that keep being replayed in our head
like broken records, stuck in a negative present.
As two sides of the same coin, positive and negative moments of alignment with the
world coexist and are codefined. These moments may be accidental meetings that are
source of love and comfort, or apex moments of hate and violence. Being at the right or
wrong place at the right or wrong time can lead to exactly opposite kinds of resonance,
giving a particular spin to our existence for better and for worse.
Positive and negative moments of resonance shape our fate as individuals. Together,
these moments may be the template of what we experience as the “now” or specious
present in our self-conscious mind. Those are memories of snapshot alignments between
us and the world; events of resonance anchored in the unstoppable passage of time.
What we understand as the present or the now is probably nothing more than fictitious
memory stamps and representations of what is passing, the product of our self-
conscious imagination caught in time.
In summary, to answer the opening question of this chapter, the most direct and generic
sense of what we mean by “now” is nothing but what we represent as the passing of
time. It is what stands for the grains of sand rushing down the hourglass as we stare at
it. Time is unstoppable but in our self-conscious, inventive, and fertile imagination by
which we represent and reminisce events that happened and may happen in the future.
As we will see next, already from prehistorical times, our modern human ancestors
showed desperate attempts at stopping time, the only way to contemplate the essence of
what we are and our place in the universe as ephemeral self-conscious beings caught in
time and carried along with the movement of all things.