ABSTRACT
Setting the scene for the rest of the book, this chapter considers various ways of identifying different kinds of time. James’ account of time and consciousness, includes the notion of the flow of time/stream of thought (the ‘natural’/commonsense view, which stipulates a fixed past, immediate present, and open future). While the view of time flowing is consistent with Newton's claim that time exists objectively, Einstein's relativity theories fundamentally challenged this claim. The physicist's account deviates sharply from our experience of time, which is reflected in the language we use to talk about time, including how we divide time into units. Clocks mislead us into thinking that time is real: what is real is how we experience time differently under different conditions (‘mind time’), including the speeding up and slowing down of time and our ability to judge duration. Philosophical accounts include Heidegger's Dasein and Kant's transcendental idealism; for Kant, time (like space and causality), are a priori mental categories/intuitions that we impose on our perceptual experience. Other kinds of time include (i) developmental (how we divide human lives into age-related stages); (ii) dream time (as described in Freud's dream theory); and (iii) biological (brain/body), the body's biological clocks which control basic functions such as our sleep-waking cycle.
