> John McTaggart published a paper on unreality of time
Thanks. Great point.Special relativity covers these, I think. Carlo's interview here explains time from special relativity perspective. He doesn't say time doesn't exist or unreal, but we have some misconceptions in our daily Newtonian intuitions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuLaUYQFIwg (Sorry if it is already posted in this tread).
> "Why consciousness perceives 3D slices of that one by one."
Philosophicaly not resolved problem, probably. But in general, in physics, entropy production explains this perception, i.e. modern stochastic thermodynamics.
Philosopher Huw Price published a few articles and even a whole book pointing out that entropy does not explain flow of time at all using different arguments than McTaggart's.
A simplified analogy is a fence with a color gradient from black to white. When one walks along the fence, there is a perception of a color flow from black to white. But there is no flow in reality, just a static gradient with the flow in the eyes of the observer.
Price also pointed out since physics does not explain time flow or even its direction, we cannot rule out existence of creatures with flow of time opposite of ours. Nothing in physics contradicts that.
And then whole notion of entropy is purely statistical property coming from a lack of knowledge of the initial conditions. Both classical systems and quantum wave function of the whole universe follow time-deterministic equations. So any future or past states of the system contains exactly the same amount information and there is no inherent notion of entropy. But since we do not know the initial conditions precisely, we need to apply statistical reasoning which under certain assumptions leads to the notion of entropy and conclusion that in past that was lower.