Einstein was right. The past, present and future is a persistent illusion because it's a human invention that allows us to keep track of our
experiences. If this universe was devoid of consciousness, the past, present and future would be devoid of any meaning.
This is why the laws of physics don't have any preferred direction. Here's a quote from an article in Wired:
Even though time is such a fundamental part of our experience, the basic laws of physics don’t seem to care in which direction it goes. For
example, the rules that govern the orbits of planets work the same whether you go forward or backward in time. You can play the motions of the solar
system in reverse and they look completely normal; they don’t violate any laws of physics. So what distinguishes the future from the past?
Again, consciousness distinguishes the future from the past not the universe or the laws of physics. There's an arrow of time caused by the universe
going from a lower entropy state to a higher entropy state.
If time’s arrow follows the increase of entropy, and if the entropy in the universe is always increasing, then it means that at some point in the
past, entropy must have been low. Therein lies the puzzle: why was the universe in such a low entropy state in the first place?
www.wired.com...
Entropy in the early universe was low because of the size of the universe after the big bang.
If I was to cram everything in my apartment into my walk in closet, my closet would be at a lower entropy state than my apartment because there would
be fewer ways for the things in my apartment to be arranged in my closet. When the things in mt apartment are spread out throughout my apartment,
it's a higher state of entropy because there's more arrangements that the things in my apartment could be arranged in.
So the universe could never be in a lower state of entropy than it was in moments after the big bang. If there was a big crunch, matter could be
stuffed back into that size but because of the positive Cosmological Constant space will keep expanding.
So consciousness distinguishes las Christmas as in the past and a trip to Miami in 2 weeks as the future. The universe or the laws of physics don't
distinguish any difference between these 2 events. It's like Einstein said:
Since there exists in this four dimensional structure [space-time] no longer any sections which represent "now" objectively, the concepts of
happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a
four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.
Everything we do depends on this distinction that doesn't objectively exist. Whether it's history, vacations, birth or death. They all depend on the
distinction between past, present and future that consciousness creates.
This seems to suggest that there's a mirror universe or another dimension of time that will allow you to move in another direction which means you
could just walk backwards in time just as easily as you walk to the store but you wouldn't know you're walking backwards unless there were 2 time
dimensions.
So time could be a direction in the 4th dimension of space and we perceive this as motion in time. This space could have multiple orientations but we
only have access to one of them. So we can only experience change(entropy) in one direction. If you had access to another direction in 4d space, you
could walk in a backwards direction and entropy will still increase.