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Do Brains Have an Arrow of Time?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ryan Smith
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Abstract

There is a persisting tension that exists between the block universe conception of time in modern physics and philosophy and the conception of time that stems naturally from experience, and entropic asymmetries have been proposed to explain this tension. This article argues that as biochemical processes in the brain depend upon spontaneous entropy increases in the forward-time direction, this should provide an entropic basis for the unidirectionality of psychological processes. As this view does not depend on considerations of abstract information processing or a past hypothesis, it provides advantages over previous entropy-based proposals attempting to explain asymmetries in temporal experience.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 81 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 265 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

The author would like to acknowledge and thank Jenann Ismael for her thoughtful comments and feedback on this manuscript.

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