Time and the Mobile Body

One standard model for time is the `timeline'. According to this model, experience is stored and the future projected as a linear narrative of continuities and successions. I will argue that animal mobility is a plausible source for the linear construction of time. Time is linear, when it is linear, because the organism is focussed in a point, at here and now, and, as a result of its linear mobility, projects that point in the form of a line. Another model, here called the `timespread', ignores sequence and assimilates experience to categories. Once actualized, the timespread model amounts to `knowledge'. Both models, timeline and timespread, are realized from the perspective of an individual organism restricted to a particular, if mobile, location, and accumulating its now-experiences in ways that reflect its self-interest.