More than what the clock tells …

… Raymond Tallis | Issue 120 | Philosophy Now. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I want to put the human experience of time at the centre of ‘time’. That’s quite difficult, because if you seem to say that the very existence of time depends on humanity, then you’re rejecting an awful lot of what we know from science, particularly that there was a temporal sequence of events before there was any consciousness, never mind human consciousness. The Big Bang came before the emergence of the planets, and the Earth came before there was life, and life came before there was conscious life. So clearly time antedates human consciousness. So I’m not implying that physical time is internal to human consciousness, because that would then put me in a very difficult position in regards to what we know about the history of the universe.

Tallis is good on time, less good in the little he says of eternity, which cannot be grasped in terms of time. The relation between time and eternity is likely comparable to the relation between two dimensions and three.