Perhaps the most lasting contribution to emerge from centuries of long-winded continental philosophy is the recognition that what nature does is distinct from what brains perceive. A perceiving consciousness is, of course, a perfectly natural phenomenon; brains have evolved to replicate external reality to a high degree of accuracy. I see no need in a modern, post-Darwinian age to resurrect Kantian armchair anxieties about the unknowability of the objective world. But it is still worth noting that every empiricist, physicist and loony with a theory about time has been nothing other than a human brain -- and has naturally based his or her proclamations on data as it is arranged inside brains.
Now brains are disentropic; they operate by accumulating organization. Consciousness itself may be dependent on, perhaps even in some sense equivalent to, steadily accumulating information. I can't defend that claim, but I suspect it to be so; "static consciousness" seems a contradiction in terms, a fancy way of saying "brain death." Trying to picture a consciousness that is not increasing its content is, in fact, a lot like asking whether a perfectly unchanging object would be getting any older. The question seems to lose its meaning.
This may be more than coincidence. I suspect what we essentially mean when we say "time is passing" is that at point Tuesday my brain has inside it organized information pertaining to State Monday but not State Wednesday. At point Wednesday my brain has organized information inside it regarding State Tuesday but not State Thursday. And so forth.
image: gpwarlow
The pedestrian way to interpret this is to say that my brain itself is moving through events, accumulating data as it goes, like snow blowing onto the windshield of a moving car. But suppose that car were "really" going backwards. That would mean that:
At point Wednesday my now backward-moving brain would have organized information in it regarding State Tuesday but no longer State Thursday. At point Tuesday my backward-moving brain would have organized information in it regarding State Monday but no longer State Wednesday. And so (anti)-forth.
These are identical situations. In one, my brain steadily accumulates data; in the other, it steadily loses data; yet all that really amounts to is the fact that at any given point I remember one direction and not the other. Entropy is in front, disentropy in back. However small a slice of time constitutes one "consciousness-instant" (presumably much, much larger than a natural chronon, if there is one), the backward-moving me will remain quite convinced that he is moving forward. And indeed, he will have every grounds for believing this, since his perception will be exactly the same in either direction.
This is the peril any science fiction narrative involving time-machines runs into: the brains and bodies of the time-travelers must not *themselves* move backward in time when they hit the Way-Back button, or their situation would be indistinguishable from normal forward motion. Setting the Way-Back Button to ten minutes would not only trap our travelers in an endless twenty-minute loop but prevent them from ever discovering that this had happened.
image: fdecomite
The point? Just that if moving forward is phenomenologically equivalent to moving backward, it's clear that remaining static must be equivalent to *both*. A "block time" universe in which brains not move at all, but simultaneously occupy states Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, would still contain, at every "consciousness-instant," a consciousness that absolutely experiences itself as moving forward. How could it not? If consciousness is a function of increasing organization, then as long as the circuits are running, it will necessarily perceive itself to be evolving in the direction of increased content.
To be aware at all, in this way of thinking, is to experience unidirectional time--regardless of whether this corresponds to anything "out there."