How Long Is Now?

At the risk of appearing a philistine, I got nothing out of this. Scientists have interesting things to say about our perception of the present. I'm not convinced the same can be said of artists.

In Dan Dennett's lengthy Consciousness Explained, Dennett shows various ways our consciousness doesn't work the way we intuitively think it does. One of the examples is our perception of time. Scientists (I'm afraid I don't recall who) have studied the latency of our senses, and different senses have different latencies. If I recall correctly, we're able to respond to visual stimuli faster than auditory stimuli, for instance. Interestingly, the latency mismatch is hidden from our consciousness, which is to say we experience a sort of 'smeared now'. Intuitively we might think we experience a single point in time, slightly behind the present, but that's not the case.

I was hoping the article would be scientifically substantive.

> "I’m fascinated by all the different ways people think about time," she says. "Some say it exists. Some say it doesn’t exist."

Oh come on. There is interesting work to be done here, we don't need to settle for this kind of thing.

I wrote this comment in the past - but while I wrote it - I was in the present