Time & the specious present

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Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin' into the future.... (Steve Miller Band 1976)

1. Time and perception

The present is "now", the moment in which we exist, and our perception of that moment in time. It is not isolated, however; we are not goldfish, with a seven second window of experience forming our present reality. Our perception of the present at any specific point in time is actually made up of a vast array of past experiences, present observations, and future possibilities. These are brought together through our consciousness to create a single moment in time for us - a moment that may only be 1/10 of a second in time. Our consciousness is responsible for creating the rich contextual environment which forms any moment in time. Those moments are continuously, and seamlessly, connected to create our here and now, and our sense of the passage of time. 

Time is as we know it. We have clocks. They tell us the time. They give us a number which connects us with nature all around. 3.26pm. 11.42am. Sure, daylight saving might mess it up, but 7am is morning, midnight is dark, and dinner time can vary, though it is most often associated with the going down of the sun. What does not vary - usually - is the passage of time. Time is fixed, for human beings on Earth at least. We all experience, or adhere to, a certain reality of time - 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute, extending over a period of one year. This in turn is tied to the natural movement of planet Earth around the Sun. Time has been standardised across the planet, and our experience of it is generally normalised. We know if it is 10am in London it is going to be 7pm in Sydney for all of us. We rely on the fixity of time. Yet, sometimes we say, "Today seems to have gone very slowly," or "I just ran out of time today, the hours seem to have rushed by." Though these are common utterances, they are nevertheless based on real feelings or perceptions. But can time actually go slow, or speed up? Surely not....

Haven't I just said that time has been standardised for us all, and that we all experience the same passage of time? Yes. So therefore, if time itself is inviolate, then the aforementioned feelings must be related to something other than real time. Perhaps they are only individual perceptions. It that possible? Yes, and to support that we have numerous examples where a person is involved in a car accident, for example, or some other traumatic or high pressure incident, and they say (after the fact) that time seemed to have slowed down during that experience. Or the opposite can happen, when time seems to pass relatively quickly, or speed up, such as when we wake up at 4am, then go back to sleep for what feels like a second, and wake to realise 2 hours have passed. What is all this? Is there any reality to this speeding up or slowing down of our perception of time? Is there scientific proof to individual perceptions and experiences of time (temporal) dilation in ordinary life? 

Have you ever wondered about birds, for example? I can be driving my car along at 60 miles an hour (100 kph) and in the middle or by the side of the road are a couple of magpies, pecking at crumbs. Invariably they see me coming and move out of the way. It is almost as though they see my car coming at perhaps 20 mph and move out of the way accordingly. They are not surprised, startled, or in any way flustered. Are they perceiving time a lot slower than I? Has the passage of time slowed down for them so that they are able to easily react to an event which to the human perception is happening much faster? Is that seven second of experience for the goldfish actually their equivalent to seven minutes? If humans can, on occasion, experience time dilation, what is to say that birds and fish and other sentient beings on planet Earth do not naturally experience time dilated in comparison with that of human beings? For a sloth it may be faster, for a magpie it may be slower.

The answers to many of these questions lies in the relatively old concept of the specious present, and the individual perception of time as a result of interaction with our consciousness.

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2. The Specious Present

Human limits on observation of time are usually around 1/10th of a second. This is what we normally observe, and this is the present we inhabit for the majority of our lives. Those individual packets are combined to create our sense of the passage of time. By default, we all appear to perceive the present in a similar manner, at a similar rate. But this is not always the case, as noted above. In fact, there is something philosophers refer to as the specious present, where we experience time dilation. Specious refers to the misleading or wrong aspect of our observable and perceived present. That is, if that present seems to be moving faster or slower, then our observation or perception of that event obviously varies. How can we explain that? The following might help.

(1) Let's call our normal present #1 (one), where our perception aligns with the reality of time, as in that presented by the clock. This is how most people experience their day to day lives.

(2) Secondly, if we are in the car accident, and the external world, or time, seems to slow down, what then? According to the theory of specious present, this means that the time period of your present is actually getting smaller, i.e., your present is no longer 1/10th of a second, but it could be 1 millisecond. It that case, during a single moment you see a single thing, such that the rolling car in the accident appears to take place very slowly (not at the normal rate), or the water pouring out of a tap simply stops flowing. We can call that state of the present #0 (zero), where time appears to slow to a stop. Such an event has been observed.

(3) Thirdly, if you have a near death experience and your entire life flashes before you in a couple of seconds, as is commonly reported, and you see the past, the present and perhaps the future all in what seems like a single moment, or seven seconds, then your specious present is actually getting bigger, i.e., in a single moment it contains everything, all of time. We can call this ~ (infinity). For example, in that seven second moment, seventy years of time are observed and made available through your consciousness. This amazing event is so commonly reported that it provide proof not only for the specious present, but also for the external, non-brain constrained reality of consciousness, for it can occur when the physical body has ceased to operate.

This artificial division of specious present time into three broad categories - normal, slower and faster - is a tool only, as in reality there is no clear dividing line between the three, and the deceptive (specious) perception has infinite variation and extension.

In coming to grips with this reality of our personal perception of time at any given moment, science is baffled. Like consciousness and other non-physical elements of our reality, science is not able to deal with the specious present. Empirical evidence is lacking, as is the ability to create and replicate. Such variations in perception of time are undoubtedly real in regards to being experienced, even if they are inexplicable according to the traditional scientific method. Like other first-person experiences, they cannot be fully understood according to laboratory-based processes, or physical, mathematical and quantum theories. We cannot, at a whim, speed up or slow down time, either its perception or its reality, at least according to our present understanding of the laws of physics, and outside of the realm of faster than light speed travel and worm holes. The fact that individuals experience specious present time dilation on a regular basis, though not with any real control is, to science, inexplicable and largely ignore. This is understandable when we realise that the specious present is related to consciousness and our perceptions of reality, both issues which materialist-based science has difficulty in coming to terms with.

Though considered of our perception of time has long been discussed, the term specious present was first coined in 1882 by E. Robert Kelly (pseud. E. R. Clay), with the following definition given:

The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past — a recent past — delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three ... non-entities — the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present.

This somewhat antiquated description nevertheless covers the most significant elements of the problem, as in perceptions of the past, present and future. There is no doubt that many of us have precognition, and some, such as so-called fortune tellers and remote viewers, can have special abilities in those areas. Of course such individuals are usually labelled quacks or frauds, and some of them obviously are. But this does not explain the totality of the experience, which leaves us with the above-mentioned reality of the specious present, which may, as some point, present us with time dilation and a compaction or expansion of the past, present and future, either singularly or combined.

A modern analysis of the phenomena is present in the following interview from January 2024 with British physics and mathematics Professor Bernard Carr of the Queen Mary University of London, and former president of the Society for Psychical Research. The latter was founded in 1882, and has sought to apply the scientific method, where possible, to psychic phenomena.

Bernard Carr, On consciousness and para-psychology, Essentia Foundation, 1 January 2024, YouTube, 2023, duration: 144.53 minutes.

With the onset of quantum physics following the work of Albert Einstein, time and spacetime are now elements of science subject to much debate and theoretic analysis and interpretation. Amongst all this, specious present has been largely ignored. As Professor Carr notes, the vast majority of the academy does not adhere to its reality and implications. An outright rejection of the concept of specious present can be found in the work of Arstila Valtteri of the University of Turku (Valtteri 2017 and 2022) However, it is undeniable that the theory can help to explain many of the inexplicable, paranormal and psychic events that commonly occur. With time, it is hoped that the specious present will be taken in by the physics fraternity and given a place alongside the mostly materialistic evolving theories of everything.

Another video which clearly outlines some of the aspects of the specious present is the following by the Artificially Aware YouTube channel.

The Conundrum of Experience and Time: the Specious Present, Artificially Aware, 2 June 2024, YouTube, duration: 9.09 minutes.

In a recent YouTube video it was stated by a long-time remote viewer and Alien contactee, that: As our frequency increases, our perception of time speeds up (Kennedy 2023). Eventually, as with higher dimension beings (5+), time collapses, such that the past, present and future become one. Such a concept is difficult to understand, let alone the glimpses of it we experience through the specious present.

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3. References

Arstila, Valtteri, Temporal experiences without the Specious Present, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96(2), 14 June 2017. Abstract: Most philosophers believe that we have experiences as of temporally extended phenomena like change, motion, and succession. Almost all theories of time consciousness explain these temporal experiences by subscribing to the doctrine of the specious present, the idea that the contents of our experiences embrace temporally extended intervals of time and are presented as temporally structured. Against these theories, I argue that the doctrine is false and present a theory that does not require the notion of a specious present. Furthermore, I argue that the different aspects of temporal experiences arise from different mechanisms operating separately. If the theory is true, then temporal experiences do not tell us anything special about the nature of consciousness and its temporal properties per se.

-----, Explanation in theories of the specious present, Philosophical Psychology, 4 August 2023. Abstract: Time-consciousness theories aim to explain what our experiences must be like so that we can experience change, succession, and other temporally extended events (or at least why we believe we have such experiences). The most popular and influential explanations are versions of theories of the specious present, which maintain that what we experience appears to us as temporally extended. However, the role that specious presents have in bringing about temporal experiences remains undescribed. The briefly mentioned suggestions maintain that having temporally extended experiential content is either necessary or sufficient for having temporal experiences, or that the contents provide input for separate perceptual processes. In this paper, I argue that none of these suggestions succeed. Consequently, the theories of the specious present have not provided a satisfactory explanation of temporal experiences and their central motivation is lost.

Carr, Bernard, On consciousness and parapsychology, Essentia Foundation, 1 January 2024, YouTube, duration: 144.53 minutes.

Carter, Elliot, Action, Presence, and the Specious Present, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 101(3), 4 April 2022.

Hodder, A., The Adversaries of the Sceptic; or, The Specious Present, S New Inquiry into Human Knowledge, Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1901.

Kelly, E. Robert, The Alternative: A Study in Psychology, Macmillan and Co., London, 1882.

Kennedy, Wendy, Are you prepared? Channelled message from the Pleiadeans on AI and ETs' arrival, Wisdom of the North, 18 September 2023, YouTube, duration: 53.43 minutes.

The Conundrum of Experience and Time: the Specious Present, Artificially Aware, 2 June 2024, YouTube, duration: 9.09 minutes.

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| Cosmic Consciousness | Dreams | Karma & Nirvana 1895-6 | Manipulating consciousness | Reincarnation & Karma | Taylor Swift's Karma | Theory of Everything | Time & the specious present |

Last updated: 28 July 2024

Michael Organ, Australia (Home)