A small variant of this argument highlights the mystery of our perception of now:<p>Does the universe exist in the past and future?  Suppose the universe is akin to a sequential state machine or computer.  You have the previous state, some rules which are executed by the machinery of the universe and the next state.  In principle you could record all of the sequential states of the universe- each state is one page of a book for example.  In all of this where does the sense of now come from? Is it in the execution of the rules?  Why?  Or is the existence of the state itself that leads to &quot;now&quot;?  But this is implying that one page of the book (the &quot;now&quot; page) is somehow more special than any of the other pages.  Why?