What Time is Now?

June 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Consciousness, Husserl, Edmund, Time |

The moment of perception that we experience as ‘now’ is not a dimensionless point, the cursor on the video timeline of our lives. If it were, then we would experience life as a series of individual frames disconnected from the successive moments of now which preceded and followed the moment we are in. Husserl noted this extension of the Now and suggested that a moment of perception also contains fragments of the immediate past and future: the no-longer-now and the not-yet-now. It is this bleeding together of past, present, and future which, he posited, allows the flow of perception to proceed unhaltingly, as for example when we listen to music. This temporal extension of the moment of Now has been given support in the work of Dan Zahavi and others, who estimate the length of this Now moment as somewhere between 0.25 and 0.3 seconds. This small slice of time (which can extend or contract under certain circumstances, causing time to be experienced as running slower or faster), is the temporal space in which our consciousness exists, paralleling the physical space that contains and locates the body.