Abstract

This chapter discusses two further sources of the illusion that time passes. Firstly it discusses the sense of temporal ‘motion’. It is suggested that this comes about because, when we think of past or future events, we implicitly think of ourselves as standing in certain functional relations to those events that are very similar to the functional relation in which one stands to an object that is receding or approaching through space. Secondly it suggests an explanation for the intuition that the future is metaphysically ‘open’. This arises from failing to see the compatibilist consequences of a person occupying an extended region of space and time, embedded in the physical world. There is a sense in which the future really is open for the subject, even though it is not open in the metaphysical sense.