Purple has no wavelength. When red and blue photons arrive together, the brain invents a color for the occasion — one that does not exist outside the mind. What if time is like that: not an inherent feature of the universe, but something we assemble in our heads, with no otherwise objective reality? Would knowing it change how we move through the world?
There is evidence that temporal illusions are common, much like familiar spatial ones. Just as things far away in the distance look smaller, intervals further in the future appear briefer. Philosophers and physicists have long grappled with the nature of time; how often do we stop to ponder what time actually is? And if it doesn’t exist in the way clocks and calendars frame it, how do we make effective choices in the extensive present moment? A present moment full of many dimensions and possibilities, subject to a narrow cone of attention and conscious influence.
Time feels real, just as purple does, whether or not we recognize it as a psychological color — our collective agreement on clocks, calendars, and historical narratives reinforcing its apparent objectivity. From ancient sundials to synchronized compute networks, we have socially constructed time, and more to the point how things change, how we make the world happen moment-by-moment, into something which seems more linear and invariant than is ideal.
And the better our clocks — the more effectively they work in ensemble — the better we can control reality. GPS, which allows extremely precise positioning, relies on atomic clocks and must be corrected for relativistic effects: time dilation from altitude-related gravitational differences. If the timing is off, the positioning is wildly inaccurate. A consciously constructed sense of time is also a powerful instrument.
If time is something we construct, how does that happen? The only place anything actually happens is in the present. In addition to viewing time as a fourth dimension, the corridor of time, imagine that all of time is folded up here, now: thin in duration, but far thicker and deeper in other, more complex ways. Imagine the lived moment as an envelope — a blanket enclosing past, present, and future — akin to the membrane around a cell or the skin encapsulating a body. How many dimensions does this manifold need to cover all the possibilities? Think of ALL the things you could pay attention to at any given time, and all the things we usually do. There is a causal gap between one and the other.
Consider memory. When we recall the past, we aren’t accessing a distinct, stored moment; we’re reconstructing stored data in the present. When we anticipate the future, we’re simulating possibilities using predictive models — within the perpetual motion of now. Because we process reality in fractions of a second, on relatively slow wetware, we have to produce a coherent sense of time, history, and self in order to function, even if that means accepting an approximation of the truth — what I half-jokingly call “the theory of adaptive BS”. Epistemic ambiguity — a good-enough story gets us through, then we update that story if need be. Depending on how we feel and how we are managing all those dimensions, the present moment can pile up on itself like a traffic jam on a crowded highway, or even a multi-car collision — as with guilt, rumination, or obsession — or change can flow smoothly.
It’s mission-critical to have a model of the present moment itself. That model has many elements, each capturing some aspect of reality — some internal, some external, some about the interdependence where the two meet. Some are organized along a linear timeline, others nonlinear — and, again, there is the question of how they relate. Likewise: cognitive, affective, embodied. Across different spheres — personal, professional, private. About different content areas, different groups, different goals.
Because it represents the very situation it belongs to, this model of the present moment contains at least one recursive self-model. It runs in the background, but can be brought more into awareness. Much of our processing is never consciously experienced, and our conscious bandwidth is a narrow window, so we have to be selective about what we attend to. It is conscious attention that pulls swatches of unconscious process up into experience. Neuroscience research suggests the mind-brain contains an internal model of itself — which is common sense, but the emerging neuroscience adds a critical empirical layer.
The nature of the attention makes a big difference. Is it light, without desire or purpose? Or is it deliberate — close, and imbued with motivational drive? Attention is the decisive factor: its particular properties, and one’s dexterity and range across its different forms. Attention and will are closely related, and willful attention is linked with causal outcomes. Attention is inherently informational; it performs operations on experience while also watching experience emerge, dynamically. It even pays attention to itself — “self-attention,” in the language of transformer LLM architecture — a critical aspect of the experiencing present moment.
Higher order attentional processes manage lower order ones, and attention also allows us to pull important things into awareness, appendage-like, so we can for example examine the models we are using, evaluate how well they are working, make updates, and plug them back in. This allows us to intentionally direct our own development and operations, and determines what happens as we move through the world.
It is also the case that unconscious or automatic activities carry great causal impact. Some are deliberate processes we have incorporated into how we work the stuff of reality; conserving energy by running in the background, surfacing only when there’s a problem. Habits and routines, half-thought ideas, the emotional residue of dreams half-recalled.
There are unconscious ways of paying attention and acting that we never picked on purpose, and may not know are running in the background. These can be useful, though they tend to be less flexible — the residue of conditioning or learning that happened without our full engagement: family history, cultural mores, personal lessons we never really reflected on. Sometimes such a process isn’t observable even when we look for it, but is detectable by its impact — an impact that can’t be attributed to external factors. That lets us hypothesis “it must be me”, even when I can’t directly sense it.
Attention is core to how we sort all this information. The templates we carry for sorting matter, because attention helps us recognize what is happening — and then we attend to the selection process itself, the decision-making rubrics we use. All of this presumes a highly conscious approach is possible, and that “free will” might make a difference. Intuitively, we may gently guide less-conscious attentional and intentional processes, waiting for ideas to cohere into something usable and relevant. Or we may be running on autopilot — a tremendously useful but often terribly misleading arrangement.
There is the gap between how reality unfolds and the current version of our model. We pay attention to the difference between what we expected and what actually arrives — a difference that is potentially useful information, though it can be like panning for gold if we are less adept with working this substance. The sheer volume of experience far exceeds our conscious bottleneck.
The structure of the present moment is hard to visualize, let alone wield, but practice hones this intangible skill. It is modeled internally in multimodal fashion — polysensory, embodied, cognitive, affective, and in categories of experience we never labeled — within a mental space that is of the psyche and mind. There are inevitable physical elements too, given the embodiment and material substrate; the biological reality of these processes is part of the structure of the present moment, not separate from it. Much of what we perceive as the limits of the external world are us running up against the inside of the brain, as it were.
Beyond a snapshot, it helps to consider how moments stack up over time — even if “linear time” is a kind of a bookkeeping device. In the moment, we can imagine a domain of linear, sequential causality, giving the impression of a process unfolding. It’s a useful tool regardless of what we think time or change ultimately are. Attention comes into play here too, shaped by the templates we’re using when we deploy it. The linearized model places moments on a string, each unit of time a point evenly spaced from its neighbor. Useful, but quite misleading, regardless of when we punch in and out of work. Linear time is a social construct, and does a lot of work on collective levels to allow causal entrainment among people, and coordinate planning and action. Synchronize your watches.
Consider, alternatively, that time is conceptualized not by sequential units but by breadth — width, or span. If, given how our brains work, a present moment lasts on the order of two or three seconds — the rough span of what we feel as continuous now — we can say it has a thickness of a few scant seconds. This sliver is the locus of everything that can happen, and depending on our reference frame, is also a space within which we can be together.
The bracketing of that width can be assigned arbitrarily or purposefully, which opens up possibilities, increasing the vaunted entropy associated with opportunity. A moment could be a couple of days long, a week, a month, years, a lifetime. The moment is as large or as small as we choose to imagine — even if our actual capacity for feeling grounded in it is limited to shorter spans. This is where linear tools come in handy — for longer-term process management inside of the teeming drop of right now. But is also where linear models can hobble possibility. Good function requires a way to interrelate all the different scales, tracking and managing what needs attention, and what runs out of full awareness.
This thickness-based model, extensive in other directions than only past and future — versus the extensibility of time — pairs naturally with a different view of change. While entropy, per the second law, is always increasing, it is also true that in local patches work gets done and things get created: information is formed, books are written moment-over-moment, buildings built, the psyche develops, life evolves. There’s a rhythm, a musicality.
Rather than one big, unitary arrow of time moving from past to future, it may be more useful to picture a field of countless tiny arrows of change — vectors of growing order (negentropy) and of disorder. Each has directionality (with coupled actions making up an experiential field) and amplitude (how big its impact is). Like mathematical vectors, they can be added head to tail to sum up our lived experience, with some factors emerging as dominant. This “little t” view challenges “big T” time — the grand narrative of linear progression from the Big Bang to some ultimate fate. What we perceive as vast stretches of time are instead layered structures nested within the ever-crashing and building complexity of the emerging present moment.
Those nested layers aren’t only a metaphor. The brain runs on many clocks at once — fast rhythms (milliseconds) carrying moment-to-moment change, slower processes (hours to days) reshaping the landscape through memory and plasticity, and ultraslow ones (years to decades) that alter the rules themselves. The present moment is where all of these are read together: a “now” is a chord struck across many timescales at once. The now can take many shapes, more or less integrated and cohesive.
Causality operates through Markovian dynamics: small sets of variables at boundary conditions dictate outcomes within complex, nested systems. These variables are the true levers determining what happens. According to this theory, the variables within the “Markov blanket” hold the causal power.
The present moment is the only interface where there is any chance to influence what is happening — and therefore what will happen. This dynamic boundary, both stationary and moving at many different speeds at once, is where we have agency, if we have it anywhere. It is where free will, if it exists, resides. Where we can decide where to direct our attention, leading to a cascade of neurological changes, perceptions, behaviors and outcomes in the world, with other people.
Perceived free will has a decidedly different qualitative feel, one that becomes more pronounced as we learn to recognize the inner experience. That difference may reflect rigidity or flexibility in some area, or it may reflect how some consciously accessible parts of experience are causally intertwined with external reality — the places where immediate experience seems to have the most traction, where what we do engages like an engine’s transmission to drive effective action.
If the thickness of the present moment varies with computational complexity, then more sophisticated minds — biological, artificial, or hybrid — must experience time differently. A faster brain could process more within a given moment, effectively expanding its temporal depth, integrating broader swaths of simultaneous change. A vaster brain might also experience time more slowly, a thought taking decades but action spanning centuries.
Consider a brain with eight hemispheres instead of two. Would its present moment be like? What would the world look like to it, and what could it accomplish? Likewise for emerging artificial intelligences, or the aliens of science fiction, who think faster and more richly than our top-of-the-line mammal brains. If conscious, their experience of reality would be qualitatively distinct — more nuanced in its complexity, more adept at manipulating causality in ways that might look supernatural to us. Sheer brute computational force would give rise to wholly different realities, much as human intelligence, in some ways, surpasses that of other animals despite the significant similarities we share in the general cross-species mammal brain blueprint.
There are, however, theoretical limits to how much computational prowess can buy. The Bekenstein bound, a principle from physics, caps the number of computations possible within a given volume of space-time, raising profound questions about the relationship between cognition, information processing, and temporal experience.
The Boltzmann brain is a well-known thought experiment in cosmology: it posits that it might be more likely for a disembodied brain to spontaneously form — complete with memories of a past life — than for an entire universe to evolve to its current state. By analogy, a Bekenstein brain, drawing on the maximum information density of a volume of space, would be the best brain possible in that volume — the upper bound on a mind. There are engineering challenges to fitting more in, however, even if a computational system with the density of a black hole is the limit. Hences chips are getting smaller and smaller, memory faster and faster.
None of this negates the practical utility of time as a social tool. We still need schedules, calendars, and coordinated mechanisms to function collectively. But recognizing time as a constructed experience rather than an immutable dimension may let us navigate it with more fluency.
Our experience of the arrow of time may be best understood as a pragmatic, probabilistic, sociological, and psychological construction — a neurological approximation arising from the interplay of myriad, effectively infinite, interactions in the present moment, requiring constant review and updating. And in part, as chosen. We are not simply moving through time; we are generating it, moment by moment, via a complex array of internal relations.
We are riding the crest of an ever-breaking wave, where entropy and order keep trading places. This is where agency is, and where we can work it.
Temporally Nested Synergistic Allostasis: A Working Theory of Consciousness in Process
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics for Everything
Kirchhoff, M., Parr, T., Palacios, E., Friston, K., & Kiverstein, J. (2018). The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 15, 20170792. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0792
Interview with Glenn Saxe: Revisioning Mental Disorder Causation to Improve Treatments, Doorknob Comments Podcast
Bekenstein Bound. https://sitp.stanford.edu/events/what-exactly-does-bekenstein-bound
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