Sean Carroll

But I see no empirical evidence that that is actually real.

Josh Powers says in light of the relativity of simultaneity and the resulting implication of a block universe that includes all past and future time, I have trouble understanding how subjective experience of time passing could be possible.

It's tempting to use an analogy with motion through space, but I can only conceive of experiencing motion through space if I also experience time passing.

I don't know what I could experience the passage of time relative to if all time already exists.

Can you suggest any reasonable ways to think about subjective experience in a block universe?

Well, I think that the whole problem of subjective experience is a tricky one, as you know, if you listen to this podcast or any other one.

But again, I'm perfectly physicalist about it, so I don't think that there's any obstacles to this in principle.

I think that where it comes to the block universe versus the flow of time, there's two things I would say.

First, I don't really think...

That the alternative, you know, that you're a presentist and you really think that time actually flows in some sense, I don't think that's really coherent.

I'm not quite sure what it means to say that.

So I think that the problem of reconciling subjective experience of time's passage with the block universe is just with us, like it or not.

But it also just doesn't seem that hard to me.

I mean, it seems hard because problems of experience and thinking and cognition are hard, but not something specifically about presentism or time is hard.

There's a possible confusion because people keep wanting to bounce back and forth between the vocabulary of presentism, which is sort of our folk physics way of thinking about the world, and the vocabulary of eternalism.

You can't help say things like, I experience time passing, right?

Those are words that sort of came out of a presentist tradition, and those words should be replaced by better words if you're really trying to say what a block universe person would say.

Namely, you should say this particular instantiation of myself at this particular location in space and this particular moment of time is thinking in this particular way.

Why would a person, why would the example, the version of a person at some particular place in time be thinking in a particular way?

Why is it that me at some particular moment of time has the impression in the folk physics way of thinking about things that time is passing?