The Muddlescape of Time

There is a well-known clash between the subjective sensation of time as flowing or passing, and the physicist’s description of ‘block time’ in which all of time is laid out as a timescape, the temporal analogue of a spatial landscape. A common mistake is to conflate the physical arrow of time — the asymmetry of sequences of physical states under time reversal — with the psychological flow of time. A clearer picture is to replace the language of time’s passage with one in which states of the world at various moments are correlated with states of the brain at those same moments. Time’s flow is a purely psychological phenomenon and not an aspect of fundamental spacetime physics.