This seems weirdly specific. Perception of time surely doesn't need a ceasium clock? That there may be differences in how we perceive time and indeed ourselves is trivially true. But the assumption that our experience has nothing in common in terns of our perception of time seems odd. We have had AB on the Searching for God thread continually banging on about how all non human animals are simply reactive, and that being challenged strongly by torridon.
When the links to the orangutan making the hammock, or the monkey trying to resuscitate its electrocuted companion, or the elephants saving the baby elephant when it falls into the water, these seem to me to need a fairly rich concept of time to allow for cause and effect, and intentional actions to take place.
On animals 'merely reacting' I object principally to the implication that they are essentially insentient beings with no inner experience involved in their responses; biological robots in other words. I would argue that the responses of most higher animals are mediated through the mechanisms of emotion as they are for us. So, when a squirrel buries nuts in the autumn, it does so because it
wants to, a complex inner emotional state, an evolved instinctive behaviour, but it is not cognitively forward planning in the way that we would plan for winter, knowing what is coming. It is living in the moment. Some animals however do seem to be able to cognitively factor in the future and to use imagination and what-if thinking to guide their behaviours, chimps, corvids, orangs etc perhaps. Taken across the animal kingdom as a whole, these are the exceptions rather than the rule, most creatures survive on basically instinctive behaviours.
