I don’t have precise answer to your question, but have some question which can prehaps be useful in answering it.
Namely: what about space? I mean, you talk here about time, something along the lines of “We can imagine our Universe as a solid eternal block of spacetime, so why do I experiencing present moment instead of all moments at once?” But what about “We can imagine our universe as a solid eternal block of spacetime, so why I am experiencing ‘here’ locality instead of all places at once?”. I think these are very similar questions.
We can go even further and ask “We can imagine Multiverse of self-consistent mathematical objects (among which is, of course, our Universe) as one eternal blob, so why do we experience present, local moment instead of everything existent?”.
It seems, the key to confusion here is that we imagining ourself as an outside observer of arbitrary high level and then we ask “why our experience difers from experience of such an observer”. But this is exactly because we are not this observer. What we are is a different question, of course. I personally havn’t yet found a satisfactory answer to the hard problem of consciousness, but it seems this specific in experience (space/time locality) tells us about something about which consciousness is certainly not.
Related to this idea of space, is maybe asking “why am I me, and not someone else?”.
The question in quotes is obviously nonsense, but I think it can get quite confusing, especially if we start assuming that people can be replicated (perhaps using digital copies). If you are one of 5 copies of a digital personality, does it make sense for you to be grateful you are not a different one of those copies? The world would not in any mechanical way be different if you were one of the copies and they were you. So it becomes complicated to think about because it seems to imply that two mechanically identical universes can be subjectively different for “me” (for some value of “me”).
The time question in the original post I think it kind of equivalent. They are sort of thinking that their are many, many “me”‘s at different times, all with different experiences. But that I am right now only one of those “me”’s. What is special about that one that it is the one that I am experiencing right now.
I don’t have precise answer to your question, but have some question which can prehaps be useful in answering it.
Namely: what about space? I mean, you talk here about time, something along the lines of “We can imagine our Universe as a solid eternal block of spacetime, so why do I experiencing present moment instead of all moments at once?” But what about “We can imagine our universe as a solid eternal block of spacetime, so why I am experiencing ‘here’ locality instead of all places at once?”. I think these are very similar questions.
We can go even further and ask “We can imagine Multiverse of self-consistent mathematical objects (among which is, of course, our Universe) as one eternal blob, so why do we experience present, local moment instead of everything existent?”.
It seems, the key to confusion here is that we imagining ourself as an outside observer of arbitrary high level and then we ask “why our experience difers from experience of such an observer”. But this is exactly because we are not this observer. What we are is a different question, of course. I personally havn’t yet found a satisfactory answer to the hard problem of consciousness, but it seems this specific in experience (space/time locality) tells us about something about which consciousness is certainly not.
Related to this idea of space, is maybe asking “why am I me, and not someone else?”.
The question in quotes is obviously nonsense, but I think it can get quite confusing, especially if we start assuming that people can be replicated (perhaps using digital copies). If you are one of 5 copies of a digital personality, does it make sense for you to be grateful you are not a different one of those copies? The world would not in any mechanical way be different if you were one of the copies and they were you. So it becomes complicated to think about because it seems to imply that two mechanically identical universes can be subjectively different for “me” (for some value of “me”).
The time question in the original post I think it kind of equivalent. They are sort of thinking that their are many, many “me”‘s at different times, all with different experiences. But that I am right now only one of those “me”’s. What is special about that one that it is the one that I am experiencing right now.