ABSTRACT
As animals are conscious, so animals experience time. They do not experience that they experience time. This second-order temporal quality seems reserved for man. And even this is wholly distinct from the scientific conception of time as a physico-chemical process which includes us all as creatures in the physico-chemical universe. This distinction is critical, though psychic time forms its base, as we shall see, and it is similar to distinctions made by scientists in other areas of reality. (We may also say that science itself makes these distinctions because science is time-binding, it is deliberately constructed as an active process.)
AWARENESS OF AWARENESS - ACCELERATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS, A2
Inherent in the concept of routing that humans have developed, and an intricate aspect of the conscious development of methods for natural object manipulation and novel object construction, is the experience of second-order time. In somatic nature, circadian and seasonal rhythms and the biorhythms of hunger and fatigue and menstruation and heartbeat and breathing and the growing of body and facial hair and of nails, and the like, are all indications of the succession of events that in themselves are or could be sufficient to give rise, in prepared and capable mental organizations, to an awareness of the awareness of time. But, in themselves, these apparently do not alone suffice. Apart from menstruation, such events occur in animals. Something additional emerged from these when that specially adroit prowess of mental energy control requisite to the conscious planning and developing of alternatives evolved. This accelerated or second derivative of awareness, A2, is also at the basis of the language capacity (metalanguage, in modern terms) and the extraordinary sensory-mental imaging (visions of visions, V2) that found its way down into dark caves and thence up on to artifically lit walls some 35,000 years ago. Language is the most noticeable expressive emergent of this special mental organization, but routing and planning and modelling and time awareness are expressive emergents as well.
