Why do we consistently think of time as going forward?
I mean, time is an intangible thing. Why don't we think of it moving upwards, or outwards? Why do we think it moves at all? True, nothing could move without time - and I suppose that applies to time as well, since it couldn't even exist without itself, of course (and only things that exist can move).
I like to think of the universe as a giant, four dimensional block of something like clear lucite, with little impurities sprinkled carefully throughout it. In this scenario, "time" is a big, three dimensional knife-like thing, moving slowly along a certain direction. The part of the hyperblock that is being sliced is the current moment. The knife-thing keeps moving, so time appears to flow. The little impurities in the hyperblock are our atoms - they tend to look like spaghetti along the direction that the knife-thing is moving. If you think about the cross section of a strand of spaghetti, it is just a little dot. So appear the atoms in the slice.
The problem with this thought is that it requires a higher, or at least another, dimension of time in which the knife-thing operates, since as I mentioned before, nothing can move without time. And once you allow that, you can then think of a higher order hyperhyperblock that contains the knife-thing and the original hyperblock as impurities, with its own hyperknife-thing. This chain can be followed upwards indefinitely. (And why upwards, hmmm?)
Granting that, another problem with this thought is that it requires a very carefully constructed hyperblock to maintain the illusion of cause and effect. If every little atom-spaghetti strand is not placed just so, objects could appear and disappear without warning, and in general, the "flow" of time (another illusion) would be disrupted.
There is really no way that we can be aware if this is in fact happening right now. The knife-thing is not necessarily constrained to move in a linear fashion, or to move at all. The sensation of a future moving to a present and then receding into a past may all be just a single moment of existence, with all memories intact. Along those lines, it would be much easier to create just a brain to have a single thought and prebuilt memories without bothering to create the rest of the universe - that could just be coded as nerve impulses.
There is not any advantage that I can ascertain to believing this or not believing this - things just are as they are. It makes sense to act on our senses in either case. All any of us have to go on is empirical data that seems to suggest that the physical rules that held yesterday will hold again tomorrow. There are no guarantees.
You can respond to my ranting here.
You're out of rant, I'm out of time.