Isn't an alternative takeaway that this proves "it turns out that dying in about 2 seconds is fine actually, happens all the time and it's no big deal"?
If there is a sense in which you are about to die, but it's not scary and not painful and you won't even realize it's happening and neither will your friends and loved ones and also it's already happened to past versions of you and everyone you know countless times over and nothing bad came of it, this seems to vindicate lucretius. Turns out dying qua dying is fine as long as you cut out all the surrounding bad stuff.
(This is also why I'm fine with hopping into a Star Trek transporter: yes it does kill you, but only in a sense in which I'm always already dying all the time and it's fine actually)
Also, the thing you mention at the end reminds me of the "Personite Problem". Have you ever looked into that? Seems like the sort of weird consciousness thing you'd be into.
Yes, believe this was defended by Ted Sider with his four-dimensionalism. The person with temporal parts, the four-dimensional worm, is identical to itself in the block of eternalism. There's more nuance than that with counterparts, but think that's the basics
My favourite video I ever got from my undergraduate degree was of my metaphysics lecturer saying "I am a four-dimensional worm . . . and so is Brad Pitt!"
Doubting the four dimensions means doubting relativity, and I don't. The real question isn't how many dimensions there are but whether they make up a static block. That fork decides the worry, not the worm.
If it's a block, every stage is equally real and none of them ever stops being real. Your current experience of the table and the laptop is fixed in the manifold for good. That's closer to a kind of immortality than to "everybody is about to die" — the stage-theory death only looks like death
from inside a present that's moving, and in a block nothing moves. What's left is the harder question: not whether you survive, but why it's THIS now you're having and not the one with the childhood memories. A block has no room for a privileged present, and yet here one is.
If it isn't a block, then time really is different in kind from space, each moment sealed off from the ones before it. You get an immortal trail of past stages but no single experience running through them. And now you owe an account of a universal "now" that general relativity seems to forbid,
since simultaneity isn't frame-independent. That looks like a bill that has to be paid somewhere.
So I don't think the worm is the problem. Settle what time is first, and the identity question rearranges itself around whichever horn you land on.
Very interesting! Einstein found some comfort in the face of death from "the separation between past, present and future [having] only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion."
I appreciate the tension with relativity and A-theory. On the other hand, A-theory fits better with certain interpretations of QM. We'll have to wait till they manage to unify QM and GR and see how things look... Also, there are forms of eternalism on which the individual is fully located at distinct times, rather than being a spacetime worm spread across time.
On the QM/GR wait: I'm not sure the privileged present has to sit in the manifold at all. If spacetime is the output of a self-referential process, some system modelling the world and itself, then the 'now' is a feature of that process, the position of its read/write-head, not of the block it draws. GR keeps governing the block; the present lives one level down, in whatever computes it, so there may be no relativity bill to pay. I've argued elsewhere that spacetime plausibly emerges from exactly that kind of process, which is why the QM/GR unification you mention is the case I keep watching.
I think four-dimensionalism has lots of good reasons to support it, not least relativity. I think your problems with it can all be dealt with, but it may involve shuffling some of your concepts around a bit.
> A question still remains: Is that spacetime worm me?
First off, I don't think this is a meaningful question. It is or isn't, depending on what criteria something needs to satsify in order for you to deem it to be you. There is no fact of the matter. It's like asking whether a meter is a long or short distance. Or at least that's my view. I'm not arguing for this here, just noting it as one assumption you might want to question.
> There is at least one thing I know with certainty to exist, and that is my conscious mind as it is right now.
OK. Hold that thought. In particular the "right now" and let's turn to your argument.
In your argument, you either neglected the fact that your current experience only exists at a particular time and not outside of time, or begged the question by implicitly assuming that only one time exists and so does not need to be specified. On 4D-ism, you always need to specify a time, since events take place at particular times and all times are equally real. So the argument becomes:
* I am the thing that has my conscious experience *now*
* A spacetime worm has my conscious experience *now*
* Therefore, I am a spacetime worm
We could use other times too.
* I am the thing that had the conscious experience of breaking my toe *last week*
* A spacetime worm had the conscious experience of breaking my toe *last week*
* Therefore, I am a spacetime worm.
> I am certainly not experiencing events of my childhood or of my life at the age of sixty four.
Neither is your spacetime worm. You are using the present continuous tense. The present continuous tense picks out a particular time: "now". The experience of the spacetime worm at this time is not that of the events of your childhood.
It doesn't experience things all at once. It experiences different things at different times. Just as it has different spatial locations at different times. 4D-ism is not the elimination of time, it is treating time as a dimension somewhat analogous to space, with different points in time being equally real objectively, and the now being indexical.
> This is precisely the content of the fear of imminent death:
No it isn't. You have to adjust your concepts. If you take the stage view, then death is not ceasing to be. Death is instead the end of the worm. On the stage view, there is nothing to fear about ceasing to be, as long as the worm continues and there is a new stage to take your place. If you choose to identify with a stage, then ceasing to be is, as a matter of psychological fact, normal and expected and untroubling. Further, there's no rational requirement to find it troubling. You can still be troubled by death (the end of the worm) if you want.
I'm using the word 'I' in a very particular way: to pick out the entity that immediately has my conscious experiences. I guess the spacetime worm has my experiences in a derivative sense, i.e. it has a temporal part that has my experiences. But it doesn't immediately instantiate my experiences. Maybe you and I fear different things, but what I fear is the 'I' that has my experiences not existing in a couple of seconds time....
In my new book ("nothing lasts, but nothing ever ends", springer, 2026) I suggest a view, tentatively called 'stack theory', in which yes, there is a new "me" every moment, but the new me contains all the old "mes" in the past as proper parts.
This is different from the space time worm because there, only the worm has the stages as parts while the stages are just different from each other, whereas on stack theory there is a proper full entity at every moment.
I think stack theory is less problematic, from the point of view of lived experience at least, because I am still there in the future, as a proper part of a new entity. And if the future is close, the new entity is very similar to me now, since we have most parts (all of our past) in common.
In principle I think it is compatible with both eternalism and the growing block view, but I agree that there is a natural affinity with a growing block view. However, the growing block view suggests that there is two different ways of existing (e.g. "becoming" in the present and "being" in the past). I am not sure I like that...
In order to be compatible with regular old eternalism you'd still need something like moving spotlight theory to give you a privileged present.
Otherwise how does a "new part of you" arrise every successive instant if there's no present.
And if you need that then you've accepted an even less parsimonious theory. There's both an objective present and a plethora of past and future entities we need to believe in.
I am not sure that this "stack theory" needs a privileged present. The world could just be such that it consists of entities that grow like concentric circles, where the entity at the next time-step always includes those at the previous time-step as proper parts. There would not be anything special about one of these entities, they all exist in the same way, but the "concentric-circles" structure would be special and unlike what we have in stage-theory.
I had no idea I was a stage theorist four-dimentionalist until now. That seems completely coherent, aligns with all the laws of physics and is how I’ve always viewed reality - thanks!
I suggest you read into black holes: inside the event horizon the radial component of space and our conventional time dimension swap! Making a three-dimensional tube shaped space, and the singularity becomes a moment in the future rather than a position in space. Huge philosophical implications on this topic.
This reminds me of a difference in personal identity concepts you might find in former pro athletes that differs from intellectuals. Pro athletes will very frequently talk in terms of identifying with their past selves or selves in their prime, however intellectuals/artists are at more liberty to gaslight themselves and say "I'm more wise now than I've ever been" even if it's untrue they still can actively view it that way, the former pro-athlete however isn't at liberty to lie to themselves in the same way, and it's clear to them that their "best self" is a past one, because current engagement with their passion is a let down versus what formerly was. So one way of viewing presentist style identification is it's a kind of intellectual snobbery that intellectuals and artists can get away with because short of dementia they can pursue the same thing they've identified with all along, and say here is me, the same guy, current project best project, where some athlete might go "what's current sucks and isn't me" and "I" was truly living elsewhere, not here.
I think for most properties, Lewis's analysis is fine: I (the spacetime worm) has hands and feet in virtue of having temporal parts that have feet. But when I pick out 'I' as the thing that has my experiences, I'm referring to the thing that has my experiences in a non-derivative sense.
How do you know that your spacetimeworm lacks experiences in a non-derivative sense? How do you know that you succeeded in referring to what you just here asserted that you're referring to? It kind of looks like bald assertion or question-begging, and if not that, then an appeal to your audience's intuitions, which presumably (I presume that you presume) would deliver that your verdict sound intuitive to their ear. If it is indeed the appeal-to-intuition move, I'll note that it doesn't sound intuitive to my ear, so what else do you have for me?
"That Philip-shaped spacetime worm is certainly not having the experience I have just been describing." If perdurantism is right, then the spacetime worm DOES have (Read in a timeless sense! It is very important that this is read atemporally, not tensed) the experience, namely *in virtue of* having a temporal part that has it. Just like a physical object can have the property of being bent in virtue of having a proper part that is bent.
The spacetime worm has my experiences in a derivative sense, in virtue of having a temporal part that has my experiences. But *I* have my experiences in a non-derivative sense: there is something that it's like to be me.
Would a Whiteheadian Process view help here? If you view your spacetime worm as a process and not a collection of temporal things, you dont die every two seconds, you evolve. You, and every other worm, are smeared across spacetime with no static, singular present. You are not located in a precise geographic or temporal location. You are a blur, a constantly changing event. Worms grow as entities integrate past wormy decisions into new wormy directions, lured by the "creative advance into novelty". Worms are the trace of this creative process. The self you experience is the "flame front" of this creative advance.
The obvious thing to do seems to be to imagine instead of lengthening along the worm to shorten. The experience you are talking about is not the absolute now it's the specious present that extends for some duration, you hear the sound of children playing, sounds can't not be of duration zero they are the experience of an oscillation. Also identifying a sound as children playing requires amalgamating a collection of different noises that occur in close succession and so on. So now already extends over a length of spacetime. The Goff in the specious present is already a spacetime worm just of very short length, stage theory I guess would be one way of working this out there are probably others.
Just to be clear I'm pretty sure we've had experience of paying attention to events and narrowing the specious present, so I'm going to take it as rather uncontroversial that our now in this sense is composed of smaller nows with no apparent limit. I can pay attention to a chord progression as a single unit of musical experience or I can pay attention to each note both experiences are equally an experience of now etc.
Consider though the actual true nows of which the specious present spacetime worm Goff is composed, what is their experience, well clearly it would be a blank, not enough time to hear anything, see anything etc. "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." Now the specious present spacetime worm's experience is not a simple amalgamation of each slice of the worm (each absolute now), otherwise it would just likewise be nothing. You imagine the human lifetime spacetime worm has experiencing childhood and old age at the same time, therefore if we were limited to simple amalgamation we'd have to imagine the specious present spacetime worm amalgamating the same way we'd have to imagine all the nothings of each now as amalgamating to one big nothing happening all at once which is actually easy but clearly unsatisfactory (does not reproduce the experience of the specious present we have).
Going back to the experience of a chord progression, when I experience a chord progression as present this is a different composite experience from experiencing of experiencing each note in the chord progression at the same time. Experiencing each note at the same time would be a harmony or disharmony or something not a chord (although each chord is multiple notes at once also). So we have a way of amalgamating parts of our experience that is different from each adding the same simple experience on top of each other unchanged. Rather as each note in a chord changes how the other sounds and each chord in a chord progression changes how each cord sounds, so each slice of absolute now changes how we experience the other slices or at least the amalgamation of them. Likewise the spacetime worm experience would not have to amalgamate a lifetime of experience as a simple addition as you suggest instead each moment could amalgamate to different (possibly overlapping) specious presents and the specious presents could amalgamate to some other proper "lifetime experience" if there is such a thing wholly consistent with your experience of the specious present and so on.
The alternative is to deny we ever experience such complex amalgamations we never experience the notes in a chord progression as different based on what the transition was between the chords. We never experience the sound of children playing because that transcends the strict now and so on. This again seems unsatisfying as an account of actual experience.
I first learned of time worms from Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians in Slaughter House Five. Vonnegut makes a lot of sense when you're thirteen and when you're 60.
Isn't an alternative takeaway that this proves "it turns out that dying in about 2 seconds is fine actually, happens all the time and it's no big deal"?
If there is a sense in which you are about to die, but it's not scary and not painful and you won't even realize it's happening and neither will your friends and loved ones and also it's already happened to past versions of you and everyone you know countless times over and nothing bad came of it, this seems to vindicate lucretius. Turns out dying qua dying is fine as long as you cut out all the surrounding bad stuff.
(This is also why I'm fine with hopping into a Star Trek transporter: yes it does kill you, but only in a sense in which I'm always already dying all the time and it's fine actually)
I can see the case for that. I think on balance, though, I'd rather exist tomorrow.
Also, the thing you mention at the end reminds me of the "Personite Problem". Have you ever looked into that? Seems like the sort of weird consciousness thing you'd be into.
This one is close to the top of my all time favorites by Goff.
thanks!
Could the B-theory be combined with the view that I remain numerically the same subject while having different properties at different times?
Edit: I just realised this is just B-theory combined with endurantism.
yes, indeed. E. J. Lowe, for example, defends this. Although I worry about Lewis's issue of problem of temporary intrinsics.
Yes, believe this was defended by Ted Sider with his four-dimensionalism. The person with temporal parts, the four-dimensional worm, is identical to itself in the block of eternalism. There's more nuance than that with counterparts, but think that's the basics
I think Konrad is thinking of eternalist endurantism, which is different to four-dimensionalism.
My favourite video I ever got from my undergraduate degree was of my metaphysics lecturer saying "I am a four-dimensional worm . . . and so is Brad Pitt!"
hahaha, makes me feel *slightly* more comfortable with it...
Doubting the four dimensions means doubting relativity, and I don't. The real question isn't how many dimensions there are but whether they make up a static block. That fork decides the worry, not the worm.
If it's a block, every stage is equally real and none of them ever stops being real. Your current experience of the table and the laptop is fixed in the manifold for good. That's closer to a kind of immortality than to "everybody is about to die" — the stage-theory death only looks like death
from inside a present that's moving, and in a block nothing moves. What's left is the harder question: not whether you survive, but why it's THIS now you're having and not the one with the childhood memories. A block has no room for a privileged present, and yet here one is.
If it isn't a block, then time really is different in kind from space, each moment sealed off from the ones before it. You get an immortal trail of past stages but no single experience running through them. And now you owe an account of a universal "now" that general relativity seems to forbid,
since simultaneity isn't frame-independent. That looks like a bill that has to be paid somewhere.
So I don't think the worm is the problem. Settle what time is first, and the identity question rearranges itself around whichever horn you land on.
Very interesting! Einstein found some comfort in the face of death from "the separation between past, present and future [having] only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion."
I appreciate the tension with relativity and A-theory. On the other hand, A-theory fits better with certain interpretations of QM. We'll have to wait till they manage to unify QM and GR and see how things look... Also, there are forms of eternalism on which the individual is fully located at distinct times, rather than being a spacetime worm spread across time.
On the QM/GR wait: I'm not sure the privileged present has to sit in the manifold at all. If spacetime is the output of a self-referential process, some system modelling the world and itself, then the 'now' is a feature of that process, the position of its read/write-head, not of the block it draws. GR keeps governing the block; the present lives one level down, in whatever computes it, so there may be no relativity bill to pay. I've argued elsewhere that spacetime plausibly emerges from exactly that kind of process, which is why the QM/GR unification you mention is the case I keep watching.
You can deny block time and keep relativity.
"A block has no room for a privileged present" think of it as an information store and your mind as a reader embedded at a single moment in time.
Thats the problem, there is no single moment in time in a 4d block universe that follows GR.
embedded at a single point in 4‑space.
I think four-dimensionalism has lots of good reasons to support it, not least relativity. I think your problems with it can all be dealt with, but it may involve shuffling some of your concepts around a bit.
> A question still remains: Is that spacetime worm me?
First off, I don't think this is a meaningful question. It is or isn't, depending on what criteria something needs to satsify in order for you to deem it to be you. There is no fact of the matter. It's like asking whether a meter is a long or short distance. Or at least that's my view. I'm not arguing for this here, just noting it as one assumption you might want to question.
> There is at least one thing I know with certainty to exist, and that is my conscious mind as it is right now.
OK. Hold that thought. In particular the "right now" and let's turn to your argument.
In your argument, you either neglected the fact that your current experience only exists at a particular time and not outside of time, or begged the question by implicitly assuming that only one time exists and so does not need to be specified. On 4D-ism, you always need to specify a time, since events take place at particular times and all times are equally real. So the argument becomes:
* I am the thing that has my conscious experience *now*
* A spacetime worm has my conscious experience *now*
* Therefore, I am a spacetime worm
We could use other times too.
* I am the thing that had the conscious experience of breaking my toe *last week*
* A spacetime worm had the conscious experience of breaking my toe *last week*
* Therefore, I am a spacetime worm.
> I am certainly not experiencing events of my childhood or of my life at the age of sixty four.
Neither is your spacetime worm. You are using the present continuous tense. The present continuous tense picks out a particular time: "now". The experience of the spacetime worm at this time is not that of the events of your childhood.
It doesn't experience things all at once. It experiences different things at different times. Just as it has different spatial locations at different times. 4D-ism is not the elimination of time, it is treating time as a dimension somewhat analogous to space, with different points in time being equally real objectively, and the now being indexical.
> This is precisely the content of the fear of imminent death:
No it isn't. You have to adjust your concepts. If you take the stage view, then death is not ceasing to be. Death is instead the end of the worm. On the stage view, there is nothing to fear about ceasing to be, as long as the worm continues and there is a new stage to take your place. If you choose to identify with a stage, then ceasing to be is, as a matter of psychological fact, normal and expected and untroubling. Further, there's no rational requirement to find it troubling. You can still be troubled by death (the end of the worm) if you want.
I'm using the word 'I' in a very particular way: to pick out the entity that immediately has my conscious experiences. I guess the spacetime worm has my experiences in a derivative sense, i.e. it has a temporal part that has my experiences. But it doesn't immediately instantiate my experiences. Maybe you and I fear different things, but what I fear is the 'I' that has my experiences not existing in a couple of seconds time....
In my new book ("nothing lasts, but nothing ever ends", springer, 2026) I suggest a view, tentatively called 'stack theory', in which yes, there is a new "me" every moment, but the new me contains all the old "mes" in the past as proper parts.
This is different from the space time worm because there, only the worm has the stages as parts while the stages are just different from each other, whereas on stack theory there is a proper full entity at every moment.
I think stack theory is less problematic, from the point of view of lived experience at least, because I am still there in the future, as a proper part of a new entity. And if the future is close, the new entity is very similar to me now, since we have most parts (all of our past) in common.
How do you feel about that view?
sounds cool...although I'm struggling to understand how me in 2026 could contain a temporal part form 1982...
From YouTube: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-04122-7
I can also send the PDF
This seems like it would gel very well with a growing block view of time.
Is that intentional? Also how do you grapple with the arguments against the growing block view?
In principle I think it is compatible with both eternalism and the growing block view, but I agree that there is a natural affinity with a growing block view. However, the growing block view suggests that there is two different ways of existing (e.g. "becoming" in the present and "being" in the past). I am not sure I like that...
In order to be compatible with regular old eternalism you'd still need something like moving spotlight theory to give you a privileged present.
Otherwise how does a "new part of you" arrise every successive instant if there's no present.
And if you need that then you've accepted an even less parsimonious theory. There's both an objective present and a plethora of past and future entities we need to believe in.
How would you justify accepting such an account?
I am not sure that this "stack theory" needs a privileged present. The world could just be such that it consists of entities that grow like concentric circles, where the entity at the next time-step always includes those at the previous time-step as proper parts. There would not be anything special about one of these entities, they all exist in the same way, but the "concentric-circles" structure would be special and unlike what we have in stage-theory.
I had no idea I was a stage theorist four-dimentionalist until now. That seems completely coherent, aligns with all the laws of physics and is how I’ve always viewed reality - thanks!
I suggest you read into black holes: inside the event horizon the radial component of space and our conventional time dimension swap! Making a three-dimensional tube shaped space, and the singularity becomes a moment in the future rather than a position in space. Huge philosophical implications on this topic.
This reminds me of a difference in personal identity concepts you might find in former pro athletes that differs from intellectuals. Pro athletes will very frequently talk in terms of identifying with their past selves or selves in their prime, however intellectuals/artists are at more liberty to gaslight themselves and say "I'm more wise now than I've ever been" even if it's untrue they still can actively view it that way, the former pro-athlete however isn't at liberty to lie to themselves in the same way, and it's clear to them that their "best self" is a past one, because current engagement with their passion is a let down versus what formerly was. So one way of viewing presentist style identification is it's a kind of intellectual snobbery that intellectuals and artists can get away with because short of dementia they can pursue the same thing they've identified with all along, and say here is me, the same guy, current project best project, where some athlete might go "what's current sucks and isn't me" and "I" was truly living elsewhere, not here.
couldn’t you use the same reasoning to conclude that you don’t have hands and feet, since you don’t know with certainty that you have hands and feet?
I think for most properties, Lewis's analysis is fine: I (the spacetime worm) has hands and feet in virtue of having temporal parts that have feet. But when I pick out 'I' as the thing that has my experiences, I'm referring to the thing that has my experiences in a non-derivative sense.
How do you know that your spacetimeworm lacks experiences in a non-derivative sense? How do you know that you succeeded in referring to what you just here asserted that you're referring to? It kind of looks like bald assertion or question-begging, and if not that, then an appeal to your audience's intuitions, which presumably (I presume that you presume) would deliver that your verdict sound intuitive to their ear. If it is indeed the appeal-to-intuition move, I'll note that it doesn't sound intuitive to my ear, so what else do you have for me?
"That Philip-shaped spacetime worm is certainly not having the experience I have just been describing." If perdurantism is right, then the spacetime worm DOES have (Read in a timeless sense! It is very important that this is read atemporally, not tensed) the experience, namely *in virtue of* having a temporal part that has it. Just like a physical object can have the property of being bent in virtue of having a proper part that is bent.
The spacetime worm has my experiences in a derivative sense, in virtue of having a temporal part that has my experiences. But *I* have my experiences in a non-derivative sense: there is something that it's like to be me.
Would a Whiteheadian Process view help here? If you view your spacetime worm as a process and not a collection of temporal things, you dont die every two seconds, you evolve. You, and every other worm, are smeared across spacetime with no static, singular present. You are not located in a precise geographic or temporal location. You are a blur, a constantly changing event. Worms grow as entities integrate past wormy decisions into new wormy directions, lured by the "creative advance into novelty". Worms are the trace of this creative process. The self you experience is the "flame front" of this creative advance.
Works for me.
Space-time is scientific illusion.
The obvious thing to do seems to be to imagine instead of lengthening along the worm to shorten. The experience you are talking about is not the absolute now it's the specious present that extends for some duration, you hear the sound of children playing, sounds can't not be of duration zero they are the experience of an oscillation. Also identifying a sound as children playing requires amalgamating a collection of different noises that occur in close succession and so on. So now already extends over a length of spacetime. The Goff in the specious present is already a spacetime worm just of very short length, stage theory I guess would be one way of working this out there are probably others.
Just to be clear I'm pretty sure we've had experience of paying attention to events and narrowing the specious present, so I'm going to take it as rather uncontroversial that our now in this sense is composed of smaller nows with no apparent limit. I can pay attention to a chord progression as a single unit of musical experience or I can pay attention to each note both experiences are equally an experience of now etc.
Consider though the actual true nows of which the specious present spacetime worm Goff is composed, what is their experience, well clearly it would be a blank, not enough time to hear anything, see anything etc. "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." Now the specious present spacetime worm's experience is not a simple amalgamation of each slice of the worm (each absolute now), otherwise it would just likewise be nothing. You imagine the human lifetime spacetime worm has experiencing childhood and old age at the same time, therefore if we were limited to simple amalgamation we'd have to imagine the specious present spacetime worm amalgamating the same way we'd have to imagine all the nothings of each now as amalgamating to one big nothing happening all at once which is actually easy but clearly unsatisfactory (does not reproduce the experience of the specious present we have).
Going back to the experience of a chord progression, when I experience a chord progression as present this is a different composite experience from experiencing of experiencing each note in the chord progression at the same time. Experiencing each note at the same time would be a harmony or disharmony or something not a chord (although each chord is multiple notes at once also). So we have a way of amalgamating parts of our experience that is different from each adding the same simple experience on top of each other unchanged. Rather as each note in a chord changes how the other sounds and each chord in a chord progression changes how each cord sounds, so each slice of absolute now changes how we experience the other slices or at least the amalgamation of them. Likewise the spacetime worm experience would not have to amalgamate a lifetime of experience as a simple addition as you suggest instead each moment could amalgamate to different (possibly overlapping) specious presents and the specious presents could amalgamate to some other proper "lifetime experience" if there is such a thing wholly consistent with your experience of the specious present and so on.
The alternative is to deny we ever experience such complex amalgamations we never experience the notes in a chord progression as different based on what the transition was between the chords. We never experience the sound of children playing because that transcends the strict now and so on. This again seems unsatisfying as an account of actual experience.
Anyway, that's my reaction to the musing.
I first learned of time worms from Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians in Slaughter House Five. Vonnegut makes a lot of sense when you're thirteen and when you're 60.
and the Heptapods in Arrival.