Time and consciousness: Is consciousness in time or time in consciousness? Of course, our question is what is consciousness but first what is time? Time is an ancient puzzle. Parmenides said nothing changes; Heraclitus said there is only change - you cannot step in the same river twice. St. Augustine was puzzled: everyone knows what time is until you start to think about it and then you do not know. Bergson attempted to explain la durée; Karl Popper wrestled with the subject in his recent Parmenides. It is startling suddenly to recognise that everything is momentary: matter, the cosmos, the world, ourselves, our brains. William James' specious present is exactly that - only an appearance. In reality our brains have only the present moment; our brains are instantaneous patterns changing from moment to moment, formed from the collection of structures, ultimately molecules, chemical elements, protons, electrons, quarks, which constitute the neural material. Our past is part of our present brain, the future we expect is part of our present brain. Kant famously proposed that time and space are necessary forms under which which sensation and perception are accommodated in our minds, in our brains; we could have no knowledge of the dingen an sich. Recently Anthony Quinton has suggested that Kant left totally unexplained how, if we see only through time and space as arbitrary forms of intuition, we in fact cope with reality. Kant, unfortunately for him, was writing before Darwin; evolutionary epistemology (as formulated by Lorenz, Popper, Campbell, Wuketits.and others) proposes that the natural selection of brain processes has provided us with practical concepts of time and space to allow us to manage reality. The momentariness of everything and thus of ourselves means that we are inconstant changing patterns, changing aggregations of material; we are not the same from instant to instant. The cells in our bodies are continually dying; the constituents of the cells are being replaced; the aggregations of electrons and protons which form us (perhaps the patterns which electrons and protons themselves are) are travelling at incredible speeds, as the world turns, as the solar system rotates, as the galaxy and supergalaxies turn. What are the implications of this view of time for our understanding of consciousness ? Physicists and cosmologists have their accounts of time, space and spacetime; a theoretical physicist, Julian Barbour, has recently argued that even for physicists time does not exist. But time and space as forms of the understanding, with due acknowledgment to Kant, come before any use physical scientists may make of them. Time and space come before mathematics and physics. It may be that the idea of the momentariness of matter, of the cosmos, can have important consequences even for the most refined and elaborate cosmological and physical theories (quantum gravity, spacefoam, superstring theory, M-brane theory).

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