Worldline Consciousness in a Block Universe : Distributed Phenomenal Realization and the Appearance of Temporal Flow

Abstract

Consciousness ordinarily presents the self as a localized perspective moving from a remembered past toward an anticipated future. Under an eternalist or block-universe interpretation of relativistic spacetime however, a human life may instead be understood as one temporally extended physical history whose earlier and later regions remain chronologically and causally ordered without entering and leaving existence through a universal moving present.This paper develops two connected hypotheses. The worldline-consciousness hypothesis proposes that the conscious subject may be identified with the four-dimensional organism itself, with local conscious phases understood as temporally restricted realizations of one developing conscious life, and the second, The distributed-phenomenal-realization hypothesis proposes that first-person experience may be locally realized at each conscious region of that history without a further phenomenal selector determining which region alone is genuinely experienced.The argument adopts a biologically emergent physicalist framework in which complete physically sufficient conditions for a conscious phase also fix its phenomenal realization. Within that framework, temporal integration, causal inheritance and mnemonic asymmetry may account for experienced succession and direction without requiring awareness itself to move through the worldline. The resulting model is speculative and primarily metaphysical. It distinguishes the temporal extension of the conscious subject from the temporal extension of particular phenomenal states: one diachronic subject may bear locally realized experiences throughout its history without those experiences forming a single lifetime-spanning phenomenal state or requiring a globally privileged phenomenal present.Keywords: block universe; eternalism; worldline consciousness; distributed phenomenal realization; phenomenal anchoring; temporal consciousness; temporal flow; first-person perspective; personal ident