They pass physical signals that can be used as input...not all...some or a lot of inputs we just ignore but mentally we try to prioritize and process the important things.
Also, on the output side there are our muscles fully connected to mental content. This is important as it gives full loop capabilities, control of physical objects...a lot to explore here...things like feedback, motor control, coordination...it's great if you can understand it all working together.
Things like our eyes are a special case. They use muscle output to aim and select input.

Why didn’t you just say for what we CANNOT perceive and for what we cannot conceptualize — Mww

Hehe... this claims we can only name things that we can both conceptualize and perceive at the same time and at the same respect... hehe, connectives are tricky, but they do behave consistently by consensus of their usus. :grin:

So the senses pass physical information that can be used as input, presumably for mental content, which the dictionary (sigh) terms “perception”. As well, apparently, perception can comprise mental content without the passing of physical information, insofar as at least one kind of perception doesn’t use the senses. Where does the mental content come from that isn’t passed by physical information? I suppose thinking can provide mental content, but still, what kind of content can it be, if not physical information from sensory inputs?

Perception as mental content comprised of physical information passed by the senses, and perception as mental content comprised of something other than physical information not passed by the senses. Seems like there should be a difference, so how does the mind tell the difference, and how does the mind treat one differently than the other, if there is one?

Why didn’t you just say for what we CANNOT perceive and for what we cannot conceptualize (we cannot name).
— Mww

Hehe... this claims we can only name things that we can both conceptualize and perceive at the same time and at the same respect — god must be atheist

So a claim for what cannot be named is at the same time claim for what can? Nope, ain’t buyin’ it.

The first is quite obviously true insofar as that which is neither perceivable nor conceivable cannot be known to exist as far as we’re concerned, while the latter is quite obviously false insofar as we can certainly name things conceived long before that thing is ever perceived, if it ever is.

Connective consistency is important; logical consistency is paramount.

I use my own notation for doing this and I'll show you how I do it.
If notation isn't your thing just skip it. Most people don't like it but I do.
I use:
x , (lower case) for all physical matter
Y , (upper case) for sufficiently large neuron groups
(o) , (lower case in parenthesis) for mental content

So, [neurons, (mental content)] in notation is Y(o).
Thinking would be Y(content; initial) ---> Y(content; step 1, step 2, etc.) ---> Y(content; final).
Input would be x ---> senses ---> Y(o).
Output would be Y(o; activate muscles) ---> muscles ---> x.

So this is a process notation with just three basic elements, that's all you need. I use a semi colon to clarify or add detail. There is never a situation were (o) is separated from it's supporting neurons so it's entirely physically based. I do more complicated ones by adding known details and writing in the margins but those get messy. Seems to be useful and I seem to make progress faster.

Communication would be [person 1; Y(o; Hello) -->x; voice] -->x; sound waves --> (To person 2)
x; sound waves --> [person 2; -->x; hearing --> Y(o; Person 1 is saying 'Hello').

All well and good. Now insert time in there somehow.

Ok, I'll look for some good examples that aren't too trivial. Got stuff to do. Might be tomorrow and my internet is bad.

We don’t ‘write’ with pens and we don’t ‘see’ with our eyes. Sensory receptors don’t ‘think’. We ‘see’ with our occipital lobes.

We ‘see’ with our occipital lobes. — I like sushi

Yeah......and?

I don’t care what the occipital lobe is doing. When I close my eyes I know why I can’t see.

We perceive change. That's basically what time is.

clearly you don’t ... do some reading.

The nervous system does not allow us to perceive reality. It tries to reconstruct the part of reality that is important for its survival. A tiny fraction that is.
We do not have senses that directly measure a specific physical dimension. Even for the 3-dimensional space around us, our brain tries to reconstruct it based on input from the senses. Some senses give more information about the dimensions than others. For example taste/olfaction have no information about 3D space, sound a bit more (for humans because for bats this is the best), vision even more and the somatosensory system is the most accurate when compared to others but is limited in how much can provide at each second.
So coming to the original question, how is time perceived? Or better put, how is time reconstructed? Let's start from the present. As with the spatial dimensions there is no sensory system that directly estimates time. But time information is part of some sensory stimuli like sounds (it after all the changes of sound pressure over time), or vision (movement is change in position over time) and the brain is capable of extracting this information to infer (& perceive) time. There are also plenty of internal rhythms that can be used to estimate time such as breathing, heart rate, attentional shifts, thought progression and lastly specific activation patterns within some brain areas.
Time perception of the past is mostly based on episodic memory and a sequence of events. Also part of the "qualia" of time is the fact that past memories are faded. For example if you can't place something in some temporal time frame with respect to some other events, it should bare no time "qualia".
Finally, perception of the future is mostly the inference of time that we can have based on our models of our every day life. Perceiving "Tomorrow" has to do with things like "Tonight I will go to sleep", "Tomorrow morning I will wake up in my bed", "After that I have drive to work", "For lunch I will cook spaghetti" etc. So based on our previous episodic memories we can have a fairly decent prediction of the future (not too far of course).
There hasn't been found a specific area that processes time information and generates the perceptual qualities of time, but there are probably plenty of areas involved in this such as frontal cortex, parietal, basal ganglia, cerebellum and hippocampus (perception generally involves multiple areas anyways). So there are (most likely) not distinct neurons for the perception of past, present and future.

The nervous system does not allow us to perceive reality. It tries to reconstruct the part of reality that is important for its survival. A tiny fraction that is. — Don Kotlos

Sure it does. Reality is what appears to awareness as it appears to awareness. Reality isn’t a thing in itself out there that we try and ‘fit’ our representations to. It is the interaction itself between organism and environment.
Francisco Varela and other researchers integrating enactive cognitive neuroscience with phenomenology have embraced dynamical systems models of time perception which emphasize the interactive no -linear element over the linear computational representationalist approach of classical cognitive science.

Varela writes:”In fact, we have inherited from classical physics a notion of time as an arrow of infinitesimal moments, which flows in a constant stream. It is based on sequences of finite or infinitesimal elements, which are even reversible for a large part of physics. This view of time is entirely homologous to that developed by the modern theory of computation. […] This strict adherence to a computational scheme will be, in fact, one of the research frameworks that needs to be abandoned as a result of the neuro-phenomenological examination proposed here” ( The specious present: a neurophenomenology of time consciousness p. 112)
The traditional sequentialistic idea is anchored in a framework in which the computer metaphor is central, with its associated idea that information flows up-stream . Here, in contrast, I emphasize a strong dominance of dynamical network properties where sequentiality is replaced by reciprocal determination and relaxation time.”

Check out the following link. It introduces Husserl’s phenomecological model of time consciousness and integrates it with neuroscientific research.

https://fdocuments.in/document/the-specious-present-a-neurophenomenology-of-time-the-specious-present

So going back to yesterday and looking how time shows up in mental content, I would suggest to look at the things we write. This is probably the best evidence of how we really handle time. For example, a news article giving the who, what, when and where. I don't think the time details would be routed through any special brain region. Reporting the who, what and where would be a copy and paste operation and time would be the same. And when a reader reads a news report the time details are processed like any other detail and held as mental content.
Authors are another interesting example. They actually make their living on mental content and time details would be part of any writing. The amount an author can write in a year also might give a benchmark for what all of us are capable of in terms of mental content

Reality exists independent of us. We have no way to perceive the majority of things around us. We cannot perceive the UV spectrum as bees can or the majority of the electromagnetic spectrum that is such as Wifi frequencies, radio frequencies and so on. Our visual acuity is not good enough to see anything in the microscopic level. Our sense of smell is pitiful compared to the one that a dog or a mouse has. We hear a tiny fraction of the sound waves. If we sit across a person, we have no idea about the myriad of processes that exist in their head.
We just don't have the sensors to sample everything that exists in the world around us. We "feel" that what we sample is all there is, but there is so much more.

Ok. Thanks.

Reality exists independent of us. We have no way to perceive the majority of things around us — Don Kotlos

I’m going to self-plagiarize here and re-post a comment from an earlier thread.

Here’s Husserl’s critique of representationalism, the idea that reality exists independent of us:

Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl's anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn't merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to' or ‘connected with' one another” (Husserl 1982: 111

“For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that
the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our
access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and
intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition. “

Simply put, you always live in the past, even when events are happening, from the time it takes that light to get to your eyes, or the time for you to processes it. Its always in the past.
That said. The speed in which one perceives it is directly proportional with the amount of information you retain and go through. for example if you watch a clock (analog) and only remember the 5s (5 10 15) and someone else remembers only the ones (1 2 3) the person that remembers the 1s will feel like its much longer than the one that only remembers the 5s.

Here's a math note I wrote a few years ago on the subject. Nothing of any real significance, just playing around. :cool: