Abstract

“Intuitive time,” Gödel says, “is what everyone understood by time before relativity theory.” Such an understanding includes the perception or experience of objective lapse of time, presupposing a layer of successive “nows,” and a change in the existing. The notion of temporality that Gödel came up with in his work on the general theory of relativity has, in contrast, often been taken to demonstrate the impossibility of such a theory to account for the intuitive notion of time, and even be inconsistent with it. So instead, what Gödel suggested is temporal idealism, that intuitive time is an illusion.