the existence of life itself. But it’s also responsible for a deep feature of what it means to be a conscious person: the fact that we remember the past but not the future. According to the fundamental laws of physics, the past and future are treated on an equal footing, but when it comes to how we perceive the world, they couldn’t be more different. We carry in our heads representations of the past in the form of memories. Concerning the future, we can make predictions, but those predictions have nowhere near the reliability of our memories of the past.
