This talk is about the connection between two puzzles, about human temporal reasoning and about free will. Practically all animals have some kind of sensitivity to time, whether a mere sensitivity to time of year or day, or an ability to perform complex calculations on the results of data from interval timing. Humans seem, though, universally, to think of time as linear: to think in terms of an ongoing time in which one’s birth and death can be plotted, for example. This seems to be unique to humans. And it’s not just a capacity we have: human languages tend to make it mandatory, through the demands of tense, for example, to indicate the place of events reported in this linear time. So why do humans do this, when the other animals seem to get along fine without linear temporal reasoning?

The other puzzle is the characterization of free will. Freedom is usually taken to be a matter of a capacity for self-control, or self-regulation, of one kind or another. But there is a similar puzzle here: why do humans need and use this capacity for self-regulation, when other animals seem to manage without it? The answer I propose is that this has to do with the unique causal structure of human psychology, in which we find singular causation that is not grounded in patterns of general causation. This means that humans have unique problems with social coordination and with the organization of the individual’s own time. And our ability to think in terms of linear time lets us solve them, more or less.