The Role of Consciousness for the Passage of Time

The notion of the "passage of time" addresses the experienced fact of motion in time. Depending on the respective viewpoint, we may either say that the conscious now is moving through the once-and-for-all fixed space-time universe, or we may say that the space-time universe is moving through the constant now. In this article I try to explain the "subjective illusion" of dynamical flow on the basis of a static space-time universe as it is suggested by relativity theory. The conceptual toolkit for this undertaking is provided by the philosophy of spacetime holism, which I have suggested as a useful approach to a variety of problems. While the argument has already been developed in an earlier publication from a more technical point of view, this article concentrates on the experiential aspects of the involved concepts.