Consciousness and the present

Ulrich Meyer

pp. 143-153

in: Yuval Dolev, Michael Roubach (eds), Cosmological and psychological time, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

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