The Hierarchical Theory of Time The Theory of Time as Conflict Much of his work is an interplay between these themes, whether played out in disciplinary theatres of the sciences, the arts, the humanities, and history, or as a bridging principle between fields of enquiry themselves. Arguably, the distinction between disciplines as diverse as those that epistemically belong in the natural and human spheres of knowledge find their methodological and definitional norms informed by his hierarchical theory of time. Indeed, his work fits into the emerging cosmic evolution paradigm, describing as it does how each level of reality emerges, and how that newly emergent level experiences time. Fraser posits that the universe has emerged into levels of temporality, beginning with the pure energy of the Big Bang, which he terms atemporality (without-time). As the universe cooled, the quantum physical universe emerged, giving rise to probabilistic prototemporality. With the emergence of molecules and macrophysical objects, we get deterministic eotemporality. The emergence of living things gives rise to a more forward direction of time experience, or biotemporality, which is followed by the strongly directional time experience of human beings, or nootemporality. Fraser then goes on to posit that a sociotemporality has since emerged. Fraser posits that as each level of complexity in the universe encounters unresolvable paradoxes, a new level of complexity emerges, with its own paradoxes. These nested levels (umwelts) represent qualitatively different temporalities, for both time and the perception of time have evolved. In one sense, time is physically different from what it was when the universe first came into being. As the universe continues to change, so too does time change. In the humanistic sense, it is the perception of time that has changed, as humans have biologically evolved with different concepts of the world to those of our ancestral species. This biological evolution, and the different perceptions of time that it implies, are played out in every moment in our brain. Our brain functions in one sense as a unitary organ, but evolutionarily it contains different brains: one that controls autonomic function, one that perceives the world in the moment, and one that understands the world intellectually. By this understanding, the biological self that understands only the moment is in perpetual conflict with the intellectual self that conceives of past, present, future, and the possibility of eternity. This, then, at its root is the conflict that underlies the