English

Physical Time and Human Time

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2023-10-31 v4 Neurons and Cognition

Abstract

This is a comment on both Gruber et al (2022) and Bunamano and Rovelli (2022), which discuss the relation between physical time and human time. I claim here, contrary to many views discussed there, that there is no foundational conflict between the way physics views the passage of time and the way the mind/brain perceives it. The problem rather resides in a number of misconceptions leading to the representation of spacetime as a timeless Block Universe. The physical expanding universe is in fact an Evolving Block Universe with a time-dependent future boundary. This establishes a global direction of time that determines local arrows of time. Furthermore time passes when quantum wave function collapse takes place; during this process, information is lost. The mind/brain acts as an imperfect clock, which coarse-grains the physical passage of time along a world line to determine the experienced passage of time, because neuronal processes take time to occur. This happens in a contextual way, so experienced time is not linearly related to physical time in general. Finally I point out that the Universe is never infinitely old: its future endpoint always lies infinitely faraway in the future

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.10107,
  title  = {Physical Time and Human Time},
  author = {George F R Ellis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.10107},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

18 pages 3 figures. Substantial revisions made in response to referee comments

R2 v1 2026-06-28T03:56:44.767Z