There Is No Such Thing as ‘Now’

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Does the universe know it is ‘now’? No it does not. Special and general relativity describe a cosmos without any unique concept of 'nowness'. The notion of ‘now,’ far from being an absolute, is a fleeting, local and arbitrary phenomenon - a creation of consciousness rather than any well-defined property of the universe.

The Psychological Construction of ‘Now’

‘Nowness’ makes sense only within a specific context: conscious agents who are physically small and in close proximity. Smallness ensures that cognition remains coherent, unaffected by signal-propagation delays in the brain (or computing cluster); proximity ensures that signal-propagation delays in information transfer between agents remain negligible. Within this narrow domain, collective cognition synchronises to what feels like a shared present.

Consciousness is localised in the present

Consciousness, the self-aware experience of existence, is wholly localised in the present. It inhabits a single time-slice of the vast and universal expanse of space-time. The rest of what we think of as time, the past and the future, exists only as constructs available to present consciousness. Memory recreates an image of the past, and anticipation projects an image of the future. We live neither in the past nor the future but are psychologically perpetually anchored in the fleeting now.

Is that a logically-necessary property of consciousness? I have no idea. Maybe it derives from the differential nature of the laws of physics.

You do not fear death

Fear of anticipated future perils is rational and necessary. It motivates action to mitigate threats: our evolutionary imperative to survive.

Putting the fear of painful, distressing dying to one side, fear of death itself deserves a different treatment. Death is non-consciousness beyond some future point in time. To fear this is as irrational as fearing the non-consciousness of a dreamless night.

You say scornfully that you expect to wake up tomorrow when you go to sleep tonight. Yet - right now - you are not that tomorrow person; you only imagine them. Perhaps you have a warm feeling towards that anticipated person who you identify with your present self, an amour de soi? 

In which case there is not a fear of death itself - that abstraction! - but a present anticipation of the future loss of a loved one, someone pretty similar to you! Grief, not fear.

This would be similar to how you empathically anticipate how your lack of existence from tomorrow would cause suffering to your family and friends; understandable and wholly merited emotions for you to feel in this current moment of the present: no-one said we should be indifferent to the many negative consequences of death to those still living.

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