A paper co-authored by Giulio Tononi, a lecturer for Summer School 2024/2025, Matteo Grasso and Renzo Comolatti, participants in Summer School 2024, has been accepted for publication in iScience. The full text is available here. Please take a moment to read it.

Paper Information

Authors：Renzo Comolatti, Matteo Grasso, Giulio Tononi

Title： Why does time feel the way it does? Toward a principled account of temporal experience

Journal： iScience, Volume 28, Issue 10, 2025

DOI：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113434

Abstract: Summary

 Time flows—or at least the time of our experience does. Can we provide an objective account of why the conscious present encompasses a succession of moments that slip from now to then—an account of why time feels flowing? Integrated Information Theory (IIT) aims to account for both the presence and quality of consciousness in objective, physical terms. Given a substrate’s architecture and current state, IIT’s formalism yields a cause-effect structure that fully accounts for experience. Here, we show that unfolding the cause-effect structure of directed grids can explain why time feels flowing. We argue that the conscious present feels flowing because it is composed of phenomenal distinctions (moments) that are directed and related via inclusion, connection, and fusion. Time, on this view, is not a process in clock time but a structure specified by the system’s current state. We conclude by outlining implications for the psychophysics, philosophy, and neuroscience of time.