# Doing and Time As you read this article, time will seem to be passing. Right now you are reading these words, but *now* you are reading these ones. What was present just an instant ago has already slipped into the past. This feeling will not disappear until you fall asleep tonight: once you finish reading and continue with your day you will see objects changing and moving, thoughts will run through your head, feelings will eb and flow. Yet there is no shortage of physicists and philosophers willing to tell us that time does not *actually* pass: the apparent flow of time is nothing more than an idiosyncrasy in the way we *experience* the world, not a real feature. To take a recent example, in his 2018 book, *The Order of Time*, physicist Carl Rovelli says: #### What could be more universal and obvious than this flowing? And yet things are somewhat more complicated than this. Reality is often very different from what it seems. The Earth appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. The sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning. Neither is the structure of time what it seems to be: it is different from this uniform, universal flowing. While not everyone agrees that modern science leaves no room for the passage of time, here I am going to assume that physicists like Rovelli are right. But if this is our starting point we face a question: if time doesn’t really pass, *why does it seem like it does*? One possibility is that the flow of time is, like the earth seeming flat, a sort of *illusion*. Our senses tell us that the world is a certain way, that time is passing by, when, in fact, it isn’t. The trouble with this type of explanation is that if time passing is an illusion it is a very unusual one. Seeing the earth as flat is to see a way the world could be, but isn’t, similar to how the two lines of the *Müller-Lyer* illusion could be different lengths, but aren’t. But if there is no such thing as time passing, if it is not a way the world actually *could be*, then how can we be in thrall to an illusion of it passing? If someone told you that they hallucinated a square circle, you might well think they are confused: the world is just not set up in such a way as to allow for such a possibility, so it is hard to imagine how one might hallucinate such a thing. We might worry that thinking of the flow of time as *simply* an illusion is unsatisfying for just the same sort of reason. Another possibility, one which many philosophers have found attractive, is to try to tie the feeling of time passing with the *perception of* *change*. Seeing an object change or move, this story begins, is more than *simply* seeing it to be in different positions at different moments. Imagine being shown a movie being played back at a rate of one frame per two seconds. Your experience would be of a series of static scenes with people and objects in slightly different positions. First Michelle Yeoh's fist is here, then there, then it is in contact with someone's face. Now imagine seeing those same frames at 24 frames per second, that is, at the speed they would be played back at in a cinema. There is now a dynamic quality to your experience: it no longer seems like you are seeing a series of static scenes, but objects *changing* position, *moving* through space. You see Michelle Yeoh *punching* someone\! Given that you are presented with the very same stimuli, the very same series of frames, in each case, it is plausible to suppose that the dynamism that you experience at 24 frames per second is a product of the perceptual system: something superimposed onto your experience of the world rather than a feature of reality. What does this have to do with time seeming to pass? First, we might think that just the same sort of thing happens in experiences of real-life change as in the 24 frames per second case: seeing a real-life object at different locations at different moments leads to our perceptual system adding on a dynamic character to that experience. Second, we mistakenly believe that this dynamism is a feature of the world rather than a perceptual augmentation. On this view, then, the feeling of time passing is not only a case of misperception \-seeing dynamism which isn't really there- but also *mistaken identity*: we think that the flowing character of change perception is an experience of time passing before our eyes. There is, however, an obvious worry with this explanation: what about those moments when we are *not* perceiving change? The room in which you are currently sitting might be entirely still, yet time continues to flow. While it might be hard to judge how much time has passed inside a sensory deprivation tank, it is not as if time grinds to a halt as soon as you step into one. We might be tempted to say that in cases like these, time would continue to seem to pass because we still experience our *thoughts* as changing. However, while our inner life certainly seems dynamic, thoughts rush through our heads from the moment we wake up, I am doubtful that we experience individual thoughts to change in the same way that we see objects change their properties. Try and think exactly one thought, keep it before your mind –make sure you don’t accidently think two thoughts– and observe, introspectively, whether it changes. I expect that you found following this instruction quite difficult. It is hard to know where one thought ends and the next begins; and neither is it introspectively obvious that your thoughts are simply inner objects appearing –and changing– before your mind’s eye. If this is right, then appealing to our perceptions of change to explain our experience of flow might not be such a promising approach after all. Perhaps the feeling of time passing is not a perceptual experience? There is more to conscious experience than perceiving: we feel pains and emotions, intuitions and yearnings. We also experience ourselves as *doing* *things*, and it is here, in experiencing ourselves as *agents*, that I think we find an answer as to why time seems to pass. When you reach for your coffee cup or stand up from your desk, you have a sense that it is *you* who is causing your body to move in this way. Indeed, you experience yourself as the author of the vast majority of the movements that you make; while your knee might jerk involuntarily when your doctor taps it with a hammer, such situations are few and far between. You also experience yourself performing mental actions: you can deliberately *shift your* *attention* away from these words to the sound of the traffic outside; or consciously *try* *to remember* the last place you saw your house keys. The sense that we are causing our bodily or mental actions can be thought of as a unique type of *change experience*. However, in contrast to the perceptual case, this is not change we *witness*, but change we experience ourselves as *effecting*. In moving your body, you feel yourself making changes in the world around you; in focusing your attention and thinking your thoughts, you experience yourself as changing the landscape of your mind. Agentive change is pervasive in a way that perceptual experiences of change are not. As long as you are awake, you won’t stop thinking, meaning that the feeling of making mental changes will persist even in a sensory deprivation tank. Agentive experience is also pervasive in another way: we never feel as if we are able to *stop* effecting change. Tied up with our sense that we are the cause of our actions is the feeling that we can stop doing whatever it is we are doing and start doing something else. If you wanted, you could close this browser tab right now and get up from where you are sitting. However, the possibility of performing no bodily or mental action whatsoever is never an option. Sartre declared that mankind was “condemned to be free”, and similarly, we find ourselves, at every waking moment, condemned to act. Of course there are times when we do stop acting – we fall asleep– but as any insomniac will tell you, sleep is something you must wait for, not something you do. You can do various things in the hope that they will hasten sleep’s arrival, but you cannot switch yourself off as you would a laptop. I think that this aspect of agentive experience leads us to mistake the feeling of doing for the feeling of time passing. The reason why we cannot stop effecting change is likely a product of our neurophysiology. Brains are perpetually active systems, so it is no wonder that we act, and sense ourselves acting, whenever we are awake. Such a fact, however, is not made available to conscious experience, we do not experience our active state as being caused by our active brain. We experience ourselves as perpetually, helplessly active, but are not conscious of what is causing us to be in such a state. Not realising that this is a result of how our brains are wired, we conclude that some outside force, something out there in the world, is responsible instead: time flows, and we feel ourselves being swept along with it. But this is incorrect: the feeling of having to act is a product of our persistently churning brains. Time seems to pass because we mistake our own momentum for that of the world. Time does not flow, but we do.