Much is made in Physics about the fact that time does not have a direction. Physics and its equations appear to describe an accurate representation of reality, yet time has no one-way vector built into them. This means that one can run the equations forward or backward in time and they remain valid. Additionally, Relativity theory demonstrates that observers moving at different relative speeds and directions cannot agree on the simultaneity of an occurrence in space-time. It’s no wonder that Physicists question our experience of time as having a direction. One of the questions most often asked about this notion is “Why is it that we remember the past but that we can’t remember the future?” But this question is incorrectly framed. Why? Because the question falsely assumes that our memory of the past is something more than simply another example of how biology creates for us a product called “an experience of life”. Simply put, such experience is not reality, it is a bio-sensory creation, an interpretation of reality. And as I am fond of saying, an interpretation of a thing is not the same as the thing itself, just as a picture of a peach is not a peach.

So how does that make the aforementioned question incorrectly framed? Because when we examine the very nature of observation, the fulcrum of time as we experience it, we discover some very interesting things. Firstly, the process of observation is central to the existence of consciousness. Our conscious self is the observer. Secondly, observation is part and parcel of the bio-sensory creation of our experience of life/reality. There is no part of our observation that is actually Reality. The viewpoint from which we observe is an interpretation of whatever Reality is, pure and simple. Thirdly, observation, and the conscious observer, exist in only one place in space-time. That place is what we call the ‘now’ moment. This now moment is where consciousness and its observation ‘manifests’ as real. Consciousness, observation, and the reality that they create an experience of is therefore a manifest phenomenon. It only exists, it is only real, in the ‘now’ moment of space-time. It ‘was’ in the past and ‘will be’ in the future but it only exists ‘now’. And finally, this now moment, like every other experience of reality that our bio-sensory system manufactures for us is not reality. It is another bio-sensory product. It is, simply put, biology’s interpretation.

We believe time flows because we have a conscious experience of it flowing. But we don’t actually experience time flowing. Our actual experience is of being in a now moment in space-time. From this experience our biology creates for us our ‘memory’ of the past and of the future. How so? It is the experienced ‘now’ moment that bifurcates time into a past and future. The experience of living/being goes hand and hand with biology’s bio-sensory creation of the now moment in time. I emphasize here that what this process creates is not an actual ‘now’ as that term is understood, and taken for granted, by consciousness. The physics and medical science show us that it is an agglomeration of a variety of stimulus inputs and neural coding’s. These all originate from different space-time locations. The bio-signals that biology uses to create the phenomenon of a singular and unique ‘now’ moment arrive at different times and via different speeds to the sensors and to the brain. This ‘now’ is not a now at all. The exact process of how biology does this is a mystery of Gordian proportions. But the fact is that the conscious observer is the created phenomenon of this process. Observing the world from this created focus, called a now moment in time, is what bifurcates time into a past and a future.

What we consider our memory of the past is likewise the product of a biological process. It is a complex neuro-centric process. Some parts of the brain have been identified by science in its production, but how it actually functions, psychologically and biologically, is a mystery. Whatever the process is, it creates for consciousness an ‘experience’ of the past. This experience reveals itslef as the phenomena we call memory. Notice that these memories are only revealed at this very ‘now’ moment. These experiences feel ‘real’ to us. We are sure they happened in the past. But in fact, these memories, being another bio-sensory fabrication, are woven together and stored in some kind of unknown neural network. Biology stores and recalls these memories using its own unique neural process. It does this for the organism to experience when triggered or called upon.

So, what about the future, you ask? Well, it too is a bio-sensory fabrication. Remember, biology’s process for the creation of ‘memories’ is a neurological process that is different than the one used in the creation of the experienced ‘now’ moment in time. Why shouldn’t Biology’s process for creating ‘memories’ of the future also be a different and unique bio-sensory process as well. Biology bifurcates reality at the fulcrum of the ‘now’. We don’t think of our experiences of the future as memories simply because they are born of a different process. Being of a different process the experience they create feels different as well. But to put it in the simplest of terms, one can relate it to the experience one has when playing chess or solitaire. One is being in the now moment but experiencing the future. Distilling it further, our experience of the future can be felt through the structures from which our logical, or inversely, magical thinking, and problem solving, processes emerge. And once again they manifest in the ‘now’.

We ‘know’ there’s going to be a future but we’re not quite sure what it will be. In fact, we ‘knew’ there was a past, but equally, we don’t know exactly what it was. This is a fact that has been borne out by many experiments in psychology and brain science. Simply put, what we believe, and recount as having happened in the past is highly inaccurate and changes with time.

And so, getting back to the original question. Why it is that we remember the past, but we can’t remember the future? The question is moot. We do ‘remember’ the future but the experience that our biology creates of it feels different. With such an understanding it is possible to imagine an alien biology whose time flow experience is biologically interpreted to run from what we experience as our future into our past. The experience of their future events would feel like our past events and their past like our future. Time would run backwards (from our viewpoint) for such a consciousness. It would begin at the grave and end in the womb. And because consciousness cannot have an experience of reality outside of the one created by its biology; this reality would feel as real to them as ours does to us.

The crux of the problem is that of all the matter and energy in the universe, only biology creates an experience of reality.  Its interpretation of reality is of a manifest phenomenon of being. We cannot escape it. But the fact of the matter is that Reality, with a capital R, does not need a ‘now’ moment in time to exist. It is not constrained to comport with the attributes that biology creates, as a stand in, for it. Reality is a non-manifest phenomenon. It exists outside of the structure that our experience creates for us and so can be neither observed nor measured. As such, Reality is a Metaphysical phenomenon. Neither memory nor logic can pierce its nature.