Why Time Seems to Flow — A Philosopher Argues It's a Psychological Projection

Why Time Seems to Flow — A Philosopher Argues It's a Psychological Projection

“Time flies,” “time waits for no one,” “as time goes on.” Everyday language treats the passage of time as if it were an objective process in the world: we stand in the present and move through moments while events arrive and recede into the past. But what does it mean to say that time "flows"? What is moving when time moves?

Ancient Puzzles About Change

Human reflection on time reaches back to the earliest records of philosophy. Ancient thinkers were deeply suspicious about the idea of temporal flow. Parmenides of Elea (6th–5th century BCE) asked: if the future is not yet and the past no longer exists, how can events pass from future to present to past? He concluded that if the future were real it would be real now; if only the present is real, then the future cannot be. That reasoning raised the puzzle of how anything could arise from nothing.

Similar paradoxes appear in Aristotle, in the Advaita Vedanta school of Indian philosophy, and in Augustine of Hippo—showing the durability of the problem across cultures.

Newton’s Clock and Einstein’s Shake-Up

Early modern science often adopted a Newtonian view: time as a universal, uniformly ticking background against which motion is measured. Isaac Newton treated time as an objective, absolute parameter — a cosmic clock that all observers share.

Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity (special relativity, 1905; general relativity, 1915) overturned that intuition. Experiments had shown that the speed of light is constant regardless of the source’s motion; taking that seriously forces a reevaluation of absolute motion. Motion is relative to a frame of reference, and different observers can legitimately assign different times to the same events.

In the classic train-and-lightning example, two simultaneous strikes for a platform observer are non-simultaneous for a passenger on a moving train: each observer’s measurements are correct within their own frame. Thus, simultaneity is not absolute.

Eternalism: A Block Universe View

Relativity suggests a view often called eternalism: all times—past, present, and future—are equally real. Instead of a single universal “now” that sweeps across reality, the universe is best described as a four-dimensional block in which different events occupy different coordinates. There are no merely potential events that will become real later; events simply have different temporal locations in the block.

Under eternalism, change is captured by differences between slices of the block: at one spacetime location you remember some things; at another, you remember more. The theory removes any fundamental, global dynamical passage by which moments become present.

Why, Then, Does Time Feel Like It Passes?

If fundamental physics leaves no room for an objective, flowing time, why do humans overwhelmingly experience time as moving? One standard answer is to call the passage of time an illusion — a misleading metaphor popularized by Einstein himself. But "illusion" suggests a sensory error like a mirage, and that label can be misleading.

Adrian Bardon (Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University) offers a different diagnosis in his book A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time. He proposes that our sense of temporal passage is a psychological projection: a representational feature of how minds organize experience, not a metaphysical feature of the world.

Projection, Not Error — An Analogy with Color

Consider color. A rose reflects particular wavelengths of light; our visual system produces the experience of redness. The rose is not "intrinsically" red independent of observers in any straightforward metaphysical sense, nor is the sensation of red merely an error. It is a way our perceptual system represents objective facts about light.

Similarly, the felt passage of time arises from how human minds represent and organize events. Saying our minds “project” a dynamic flow does not deny the meaningfulness of temporal talk; it distinguishes between representational perspective and the underlying structure described by physics.

Another helpful analogy: we say a GPS "thinks" we took a wrong turn, even though the device has no consciousness. The GPS produces usable representations that guide our behavior. In the same way, our temporal representations are indispensable for action and narrative, even if they ascribe a kind of dynamism that fundamental physics does not.

Conclusion

The claim is not that people are hallucinating when they feel time pass, nor that temporal talk is useless. Rather, the central error is to conflate the human perspective — the way we naturally represent experiences — with how the world is in itself. Understanding time fully requires both the physical account (where all moments can be equally real) and the psychological account (why we experience a flowing present).

About the author: Adrian Bardon, Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.