What Is Time — Consciousness, Physics, and the Present Moment

Einstein's special and general relativity established that there is no absolute simultaneity — no fact of the matter about what is happening "right now" across spatially separated regions. Time is not a universal river flowing at the same rate everywhere. It is a dimension of spacetime, and its rate varies with velocity and gravitational field.

In the block universe interpretation — favored by many physicists and philosophers of physics — past, present, and future all equally exist. The present moment is not ontologically special. It is simply the spacetime location the observer happens to occupy. There is no objective flow of time; there is only the four-dimensional block of spacetime events, and conscious observers moving through it.

The hard problem of time — parallel to the hard problem of consciousness — is explaining why we experience time as flowing, as having a direction, as distinguishing past from present from future, when physics describes no such asymmetry in the fundamental equations. The second law of thermodynamics gives time a statistical direction. But the subjective experience of the present moment — the nowness of now — has no straightforward physical correlate.

Carlo Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics and his work on the physics of time argues that time emerges from the interaction of physical systems — it is relational, not fundamental. The experience of time's passage, on this account, is the signature of a complex system (the brain) processing information about a changing environment. But this does not explain why there is an experience of it at all.

The Infinitely Simple framework distinguishes between spacetime — created, within which sequential experience unfolds — and causative time, the logical sequence of the creative operation itself, which is outside spacetime entirely. From inside spacetime, both Essence and the Logos appear as equally eternal. From within causative time there is a genuine logical sequence — but not a temporal one in the spacetime sense.

The present moment, on this account, is the only point of genuine contact between the creature's sequential experience and the eternal ground from which it derives. The past is memory; the future is anticipation; only the present is real in the sense of being directly sustained by the Foundation. The body scan practice is a practice of returning to the only moment where genuine grounding is available.