Is Now All There Is?

I believe I’ve refuted the meditator’s idea that only the present moment exists:

You can always get a brain implant that can record everything and play it for you backwards, forwards, sped up, slowed down, or even pause and restart your perception of the passing of time. Or it can give you the experience of all time at once, or just a random sequence of events.

If you don’t like brain implants, evolution can also solve the problem, just like it’s solved the problem of giving you the experience of a present moment moving forward through time.

This is all possible because there is no universal clock, or a flow of time in the universe, or a ‘now’, according to our best explanations of physics. So you can have whatever subjective experience of time that you want.

Note that this isn’t a criticism of meditation or people who are seeking enlightenment.

Future Time Travel

You can also go into the future to some degree. For example, you can take a nap or anesthesia and wake up hours later, without having the conscious experience of that time passing.

Or, due to special relativity, you can drive your car really fast and go into the future without aging as quickly as everybody else who’s standing still relative to you. Or you could freeze and reanimate yourself in 10,000 years.

Your brain implant can also record that passage of time and play it back for you, so you can go to the future as fast as you want.

Evolution

But why has the brain evolved to give you the experience of a ‘now’ that is moving forward through time?

First, this experience is easily explained: It is the comparison in your mind between your memories of the past and your later perception.

My guess for why this experience evolved is that’s where most of the utility is. There isn’t as much utility to pausing or speeding up or slowing down your experience of time.

But having the experience of being on the cutting edge of the open-ended future was the most useful for survival, which contributed to the propagation of those genes.

People also often have the experience of time slowing down in difficult situations—which is also useful—and that might be why that experience evolved as well.