Why does time feel the way it does? Towards a principled account of temporal experience

Abstract: Time flows, or at least the time of our experience does. Can we provide an objective account of why experience, confined to the short window of the conscious present, encompasses a succession of moments that slip away from now to then--an account of why time feels flowing? Integrated Information Theory (IIT) aims to account for both the presence and quality of consciousness in objective, physical terms. Given a substrate's architecture and current state, the formalism of IIT allows one to unfold the cause-effect power of the substrate, yielding a cause-effect structure. According to IIT, this accounts in full for the presence and quality of experience, without any additional ingredients. In previous work, we showed how unfolding the cause-effect structure of non-directed grids, like those found in many posterior cortical areas, can account for the way space feels--namely, extended. Here we show that unfolding the cause-effect structure of directed grids can account for how time feels--namely, flowing. First, we argue that the conscious present is experienced as flowing because it is composed of phenomenal distinctions (moments) that are directed, and these distinctions are related in a way that satisfies directed inclusion, connection, and fusion. We then show that directed grids, which we conjecture constitute the substrate of temporal experience, yield a cause-effect structure that accounts for these and other properties of temporal experience. In this account, the experienced present does not correspond to a process unrolling in "clock time," but to a cause-effect structure specified by a system in its current state: time is a structure, not a process. We conclude by outlining similarities and differences between the experience of time and space, and some implications for the neuroscience, psychophysics, and philosophy of time.