Some might argue that there cannot be a first moment of the universe, because every moment, by definition has a past from which it comes (as well as a future toward which...). Here is a counter-argument. Every adult human being has, whenever he or she makes an observation, a present that has a past (and is the at least partially fulfilling future of that now gone-by past). So that human might generalize and say that experiences of the present includes, as a component of that present, the past. But if we treat this generalization as a necessary truth, then no human can have an experience of the present that does not include its having come from the past. In such a case, no human being could have a finite age. Each must have an infinite series of presents, each of which has a past. Which seems pretty absurd. The move from experiencing the present as having a past to assigning a necessity to this relationship is unwarranted, both in this case and in the previous one.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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