How Consciousness Introduces Presentism into an Eternalist Spacetime: ego-dissolution as presentism-dissolution.

The special theory of relativity suggests the universe is an eternalist four-dimensional block where past, present, and future coexist, yet people experience time as a sequential flow with a privileged now. This paper argues that presentism is not a feature of the universe but a product of conscious observation through the Default Mode Network (DMN), which imposes a reference frame on the eternalist block. Dissolving that reference frame—as occurs during ego dissolution under psychedelics, deep meditation, or near-death experiences—should dissolve presentism, leading to experiences of timelessness and non-locality that match the eternalist block. The ordinary experience of time's flow is thus a local construction, not fundamental reality.

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Abstract

How Consciousness Introduces Presentism into an Eternalist Spacetime: Ego Dissolution as Presentism-Dissolution The special theory of relativity strongly suggests that the default ontological structure of the universe is eternalist: a four-dimensional block spacetime in which past, present, and future coexist. Yet our lived experience is overwhelmingly presentist. We experience time as a sequential flow with a privileged "now." This paper argues that this discrepancy is not a problem for eternalism but rather its strongest indirect confirmation. The central proposal is that presentism is not a feature of the universe but a product of conscious observation of this eternalist block universe. A conscious observer, through the neural machinery of the Default Mode Network (DMN), imposes a reference frame upon the eternalist block, partitioning it into "here" and "there," "before" and "after," "past" and "future." It is this reference frame that generates the experience of sequential time. Without it, these categories have no intrinsic meaning in spacetime. This proposal yields a direct and testable corollary: if the reference frame is what introduces presentism, then dissolving that reference frame should dissolve presentism with it. This is precisely what occurs during ego dissolution, a well-documented phenomenological state arising under psychedelics, deep meditation, and near-death experiences, in which the DMN disintegrates. Subjects consistently report timelessness, non-locality, and the coexistence of all events: an experience structurally isomorphic to the eternalist block universe. The paper therefore makes a twofold identity claim: (1) ego dissolution, as reported across contemplative and pharmacological traditions, is the phenomenological correlate of presentism-dissolution, the collapse of the observer's locally constructed experience of sequential time; and (2) the ordinary experience of presentism, the flow of time, is not a fundamental feature of reality but a local construction introduced by consciousness operating within a reference frame. What physics can only deduce mathematically, consciousness can apprehend experientially, but only when the reference frame that normally filters that apprehension is dissolved.