This is somewhat like my personal view of time. All points in time exist already, but because causality only flows in one direction (the Arrow of Time), the ill

This is somewhat like my personal view of time. All points in time exist already, but because causality only flows in one direction (the Arrow of Time), the illusion of the passage of time is created. At any one point in time, your brain can only have stored memories about things that previously happened. This kind of ties into my more general hypothesis that the universe is a single mathematical structure. And that all possible mathematical structures are as real as ours. But only some structures have conscious components within them (e.g. us) who can observe. This does run into a wall with the Hard Problem of Consciousness. It's hard to imagine how a mathematical structure can produce self-awareness. But any alternate explanation is just as magical.