crocodile deathroll

We overlook the fact the time is every bit as much a sense as smell, hearing, taste, touch and sight. A much stronger consideration should be given to this most important of senses
<a href="http://web.ccr.jussieu.fr/~risc/signal_modal%20_Meck.htm" target="_blank">Warren H Meck </a>

So is it a sixth sense. I feel it should be the first and there is really nothing paranormal or wierd about this.

Automaton

Wrong, the awareness of time is an internal perception. It is secondary to the senses.

Panta Pei

The perceptions listed above as the five senses (nervous system) are all supported by the prime sense, which is the 'mind'.

It is the mind that makes all this freakiness so cool

Bill

I would agree. There are many secondary senses of this sort, including:

• A sense of beauty.
• A sense of direction.
• A sense of fairness.

Those are really just a few representative examples of these secondary senses. I don't know if I've ever seen a complete catalog of them all.....

== Bill

crocodile deathroll

Without a sense of time, you would have no mind. A mind may appear to be working normally to an onlooker, but because there is not sense of time it is a zombie.
Without a sense of time, you would have no mind

Bill

It appears to me that you are confusing perception with reality. A machine (implemented within reality) needs no sense of time (perception of reality) to work just fine and perform each and every function it has in the proper order. So, why should a mind need a sense of time in order to be able to function?

And yes, I am advocating a physicalist approach to the mind. I see no reason to believe that the human brain is not just an incredibly complex biological machine containing billions of parts (cells) that each function independantly of all of the other parts of that machine (brain) in order to achieve the purpose of the machine (brain), which purpose is to create the human mind. We clearly don't understand the way that the brain creates the mind as well as we should, but we clearly do understand it a heck of a lot better today than we did even a mere decade ago. The evidence in favor of the physicalist position continues to mount.

And no, a sense of time is not at all imperitive to the funcitoning of the mind. It is only imperitive to being able to symbolically relate events on a time scale. That is not a critical function, but is only necessary for certain aspects of human existence. Thus, the sense of time, while very valuable to human nature, is not an indispensible part of human nature.

== Bill

WideEyed

Aren't space and time one entity? How could we possibly perceive the world without time?

With regards to Bill's comments, in your view what makes the other senses "imperative" to the functioning of the mind, and why is the "perception?" of time necessarily excluded?

Ender

isn't temporality (as well as spatiality) necessarily presupposed with every sensory perception?

Or is the kantian solution to Humean empiricism too idealistic for our naturalists?

~WiGGiN~

barbelle

I agree with Bill. I think we must remember the fact that our perception of a thing is separate from the reality itself. Time as an entity (a force?) performs regardless of humanity.

Furthermore, I have had the experience of knowing a person with a traumatic brain injury closely, and in doing so have observed that it is more like a complex machine, in which one part can be faulty while the others continue to function. This friend of mine had a terrible memory, so, while he experienced reality moment by moment, he had a very skewed and inconsistent sense of time in the long term.

This is a tangent, but I also think it's interesting to add that our brains are 'self-justifying' machines. They strive to make sense of things, and, in my opinion, have an inherent bent that asserts the 'rightness' of their conclusions. It seems to be a secondary skill to consider the faults in one's logical (or non-logical) conclusions.

By the way, Hello. I'm new, and happy to meet you guys.

crocodile deathroll

I am of the view that it is a "sense of time" that underpins our other five well know senses and like those sense it can be partially damaged and distorted. In the case of our sense of time it is effected by the effects of Parkinson's disease.

It is probably the very first sense that we acquire, a feeling that you are conscious in the womb in some spacio-temportal void as the seconds tick by.
<a href="http://www.interactivemetronome.com/default.asp?cate_id=4&pg_id=111" target="_blank">Damaging our sense of time</a>