Does time exist and do we experience it?

That’s a perhaps surprisingly contentious topic among theoretical physicists:

You see, whether time flows forward, or doesn’t flow at all, or moves back and forth, our resulting subjective experience would be identical in all cases: we would always find ourselves in an experiential snapshot extending smoothly backwards in memory and forwards in expectation, just like the desert road. We would always tell ourselves the same story about what’s going on. A mere cognitive narrative—based purely on contents of the experiential snapshot in question—would suffice to convince us of the forward flow of time even when such is not the case.

The ostensible experience of temporal flow is thus an illusion.Bernardo Kastrup, “Do we actually experience the flow of time?” at Scientific American

Bernardo Kastrup has a book coming out on this, The Flow of the World.

But isn’t consciousness itself an evolved illusion, according to Darwinians?

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See also: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug Materialists have a solution to the problem of consciousness, and it may startle you

and

From Scientific American: “we may all be alters—dissociated personalities— of universal consciousness.”

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