The present, by definition, should be still.

An instant. A slice. A zero-thickness point dividing past from future. Each one of them a separate, frozen frame, a stack of presents, piled up like snapshots.

And yet...

Minds move. The blur of bodies, the cadence of conversation, the momentum of motion.

The present is never really present. Is it the only thing that exists or does it not exist at all?

It’s a paradox that has haunted minds for centuries. Augustine called time a riddle—undeniable in experience, but incoherent in logic. Heraclitus told us everything flows; nothing stands still. William James spoke of a specious present—a sliver of time that only pretends to be an instant, just long enough to let experience breathe.

Now, we have a name for what vexed them. Not just a name—a structure. A principle.

(You may have already guessed it).

Autoregression.

Take the past, predict the present, turn it into the new past. Repeat.

Generate one word at a time. But in generating that word, you generate the future—premised on the past—and in doing so, change the meaning of the past itself.

This is recursion—not just memory, not just prediction, but a loop that reshapes itself as it unfolds.

The past isn’t retrieved—it’s active.

The future isn’t imagined—it’s implied.

And the present?

The present is the seam.

The unfolding.

The recursive act of becoming.

And what goes for language goes for the rest.

Our consciousness isn’t a spotlight, fixed on a single point in time. It is the experience of the very act of continual generation, of concurrent past and future.

Right now.