People are conditioned to believe that the present is the result of the past, and the future the result of the present.

In reality, there is no past or future; there is only the present. The past as we know it is merely the result of either our memories of events, or our extrapolation given the present state of the universe. The future is also purely extrapolation.

Therefore, the past doesn't create the present, but present creates the past. The present is like a wick, and its flame is burning away into the past. As the present moves forward, it leaves a trail behind it which gets dimmer and dimmer until entropy makes it vanish entirely.

Memories have to be actively maintained or they too will disappear. Our memories are like little simulators that keep the now-gone bits of the universe alive in our minds. When we don't actively maintain the simulators, the memories degrade. People often have to fill in the gaps of their partially faded memories with extrapolated ones, which can result in false memories of past events.

The mind is a pattern-recognizer and associative-memory. It essentially takes all the sensory input it gets and finds all regularities and correlations that exist. The stronger the correlated pattern and the more associations it has to other memories, the more universal the pattern must be. The most useful simulators will stay with us the longest and will have the most/strongest associations.

What's fascinating is how the patterns and forces in the universe are so elegantly simple and applied so universally that an organism with a tiny mind the size of ours can concieve of the whole cosmos and all the forces in it! As Einstein once said, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible."