The Ruler Of The Universe already asked the question

Douglas Adams hit upon this dilemma in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Fit the Twelfth (shift-click to listen), later written in The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, and even goes a bit further.

SPOILER ALERT: The "Ruler Of The Universe" turns out to be an old man living in a shack with a cat, and he is a perfect solipsist.

Ruler Of The Universe: Ah, this is a question about the past, is it?

Zarniwoop: Yes

Ruler Of The Universe: How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

So the Ruler Of The Universe takes your question even further and asks: How can we be sure that there even is a passage of time? Maybe the past is just an illusion? How can we know that it is not?

The answer is: we cannot know this. There is no way to escape the possibility that Hard Solipsism presents, namely that everything we feel and remember — including the passage of time — could be nothing but a huge illusion.

If we relax the solipsism a bit and assume that 1) the physical world is real and 2) the passage of time is real, then the answer becomes: the persistence of the material world.

The fact that matter and energy can exist without spontaneously poofing out into nothingness — instead they are persistent and does not change form spontaneously — is what enables it. If you are material, and your brain-state depends on the material, then the persistence of the material world enables your consciousness to be temporally contiguous.

The Ruler Of The Universe already asked the question

Douglas Adams hit upon this dilemma in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Fit the Twelfth (shift-click to listen), later written in The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, and even goes a bit further.

SPOILER ALERT: The "Ruler Of The Universe" turns out to be an old man living in a shack with a cat, and he is a perfect solipsist.

Ruler Of The Universe: Ah, this is a question about the past, is it?

Zarniwoop: Yes

Ruler Of The Universe: How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

So the Ruler Of The Universe takes your question even further and asks: How can we be sure that there even is a passage of time? Maybe the past is just an illusion? How can we know that it is not?

The answer is: we cannot know this. There is no way to escape the possibility that Hard Solipsism presents, namely that everything we feel and remember — including the passage of time — could be nothing but a huge illusion.

If we relax the solipsism a bit and assume that 1) the physical world is real and 2) the passage of time is real, then the answer becomes: the persistence of the material world.

The fact that matter and energy can exist without spontaneously poofing out into nothingness — instead they are persistent and does not change form spontaneously — is what enables it. If you are material, and your brain-state emerges from some of that material, then the persistence of the material world means that your consciousness will also persist.

The Ruler Of The Universe already asked the question

Douglas Adams hit upon this dilemma in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Fit the Twelfth (shift-click to listen), later written in The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, and even goes a bit further.

SPOILER ALERT: The "Ruler Of The Universe" turns out to be an old man living in a shack with a cat, and he is a perfect solipsist.

Ruler Of The Universe: Ah, this is a question about the past, is it?

Zarniwoop: Yes

Ruler Of The Universe: How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

So the Ruler Of The Universe takes your question even further and asks: How can we be sure that there even is a passage of time? Maybe the past is just an illusion? How can we know that it is not?

The answer is: we cannot know this. There is no way to escape the possibility that Hard Solipsism presents, namely that everything we feel and remember — including the passage of time — could be nothing but a huge illusion.

The Ruler Of The Universe already asked the question

Douglas Adams hit upon this dilemma in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Fit the Twelfth (shift-click to listen), later written in The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, and even goes a bit further.

SPOILER ALERT: The "Ruler Of The Universe" turns out to be an old man living in a shack with a cat, and he is a perfect solipsist.

Ruler Of The Universe: Ah, this is a question about the past, is it?

Zarniwoop: Yes

Ruler Of The Universe: How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

So the Ruler Of The Universe takes your question even further and asks: How can we be sure that there even is a passage of time? Maybe the past is just an illusion? How can we know that it is not?

The answer is: we cannot know this. There is no way to escape the possibility that Hard Solipsism presents, namely that everything we feel and remember — including the passage of time — could be nothing but a huge illusion.

If we relax the solipsism a bit and assume that 1) the physical world is real and 2) the passage of time is real, then the answer becomes: the persistence of the material world.

The fact that matter and energy can exist without spontaneously poofing out into nothingness — instead they are persistent and does not change form spontaneously — is what enables it. If you are material, and your brain-state depends on the material, then the persistence of the material world enables your consciousness to be temporally contiguous.