Reality is not timeless.


 * Not long after Einstein formulated his General Theory, it was discovered that the universe, AKA spacetime, was expanding. Because cosmic expansion seems to imply that the universe began as a dimensionless point, the universe must have been created, and the creation event must have occurred on a higher level of time: cosmic time. Whereas ordinary time accommodates changes occurring within the spacetime manifold, this is obviously not so for the kind of time in which the manifold itself changes.
 * Now for the fly in the cosmological ointment. As we have seen, it is the nature of the cognitive self to formulate models incorporating ever-higher levels of change (or time). Obviously, the highest level of change is that characterizing the creation of reality. Prior to the moment of creation, the universe was not there; afterwards, the universe was there. This represents a sizable change indeed! Unfortunately, it also constitutes a sizable paradox. If the creation of reality was a real event, and if this event occurred in cosmic time, then cosmic time itself is real. But then cosmic time is an aspect of reality and can only have been created with reality. This implies that cosmic time, and in fact reality, must have created themselves!
 * The idea that the universe created itself brings a whole new meaning to bidirectional time, and thus to the idea that cognition may play a role in the creation of reality. As a self-creative mechanism for the universe is sought, it becomes apparent that cognition is the only process lending itself to plausible interpretation as a means of temporal feedback from present to past. Were cognition to play such a role, then in a literal sense, its most universal models of temporal reality would become identical to the reality being modeled. Time would become cognition, and space would become a system of geometric relations that evolves by distributed cognitive processing.