Time and the Unconscious Mind

Most of us think we know some basic facts about how time works. The facts we believe we know are based on a few intuitions about time, which are, in turn, based on our conscious waking experiences. As far as I can tell, these intuitions about time are something like this: 1) There is a physical world in which events occur, 2) These events are mirrored by our perceptual recreation of them in essentially the same order in which they occur in the physical world, 3) This recreation of events occurs in a linear order based on our conscious memory of them (e.g., event A is said to occur before event B if at some point we do remember event A but we don't yet remember event B, and at another point we remember both events), 4) Assuming we have good memories, what we remember has occurred in the past and what we don't remember but we can imagine might: a) never occur, b) occur when we are not conscious, or c) occur in the future. These intuitions are excellent ones for understanding our conscious conception of ordered events. However, they do not tell us anything about how the non-conscious processes in our brains navigate events in time. Currently, neuroscientists assume that neural processes of which we are unaware, that is, non-conscious processes, create conscious awareness as a reflection of physical reality (Singer, 2015). Thus, if we wish to understand how events unfold in time in the physical world, we would do well to attempt to get some hints about how these events are navigated by non-conscious processes. To understand non-conscious processing, we'd better first define consciousness. Here I define consciousness to be equivalent to its common neuroscientific definition, recently offered by Chris Koch, Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. " By consciousness, I mean the ability to feel something, anything-whether it's the sensation of an azure-blue sky, a tooth ache, being sad, or worrying about the deadline two weeks from now " (Koch, 2012). Thus, non-conscious processing would be any neural processing of which we are not aware. It is critical to point out that because we are not aware of non-conscious processing and therefore have little intuitive understanding of it, our intuitions about time that are necessarily based on our conscious waking experiences will not necessarily apply to this non-conscious domain. What we know …