This is a continuation of Existence Explained: Time is an illusion.
Video version here.
The attention schema at every point in the universe, past, present, and future is fully written and "simulated" eternally.
The attention schema, the brain's simplified model of its own processing, is not a dynamic process that "unfolds" in time. Unfolding is an illusion. The attention schema is a static geometric part of the whole, fully written into every relevant coordinate of the four dimensional block universe. At every point where matter is arranged into a sufficiently complex anti-entropic eddy (every brain, every moment of inner experience, every self model that ever felt like a separate "I"), the attention schema is already there, eternally, as a permanent part of the crystal.
There is no actual "happening." No simulation actually "running." No computation being "executed." The word "simulated" is a concession to modern human language. A metaphor borrowed from the temporal illusion. In reality, the entire complex static structure just is. The hallucination of a unified self, the "soul" in the body... this is not actually "occurring." They are the eternal interior shape of those coordinates. "My" "Ryan Gomez" body, at every slice of its four dimensional line within the universe, contains the fully written attention schema, already and always "simulating" the feelings of being "me," already producing the illusion of free will, already painting the self at the center of experience (main character illusion). And this is true for every conscious being that has ever "existed" or "will ever" exist. The Chernobyl firefighter's self model, the innocent North Korean prisoner's self model, the dolphin's self model, the dinosaur's self model... all are eternally present, fully written, fully "simulated," by the laws of physics in the static complex geometry of the whole. The whole is the entirety of the laws of physics, which cannot be 100% observed, directly (this is not necessary however). It is impossible to observe "ourselves," the universe, fully. There is no God-like consciousness. The universe can only experience itself in imperfect anti-entropic, disordered, illusory glimpses so to speak. And remember consciousness exists on a wide complex spectrum. A dog cannot be an intellectually honest physicist like Einstein.
There is no "soul" behind the attention schema. No "soul" watching the simulation. No "traveler" moving from one slice to the next. The self is the attention schema. The feeling of being a separate, continuous "I" is the schema's output. And that output is not something being actually simulated in "real time" in the fiction of a "universal now." It is literally what that coordinate is (of illusion within the whole). The universal now is real in the psychological and experiential sense because it is an illusion. The illusion is real as an illusion. But it is not actual.