Here is paradox about time that dates back to Aristotle: The past does not exist any longer. The future does not exist yet. And the present is just the threshold at which the future turns into the past and has no duration. The present is a nothing that divides two things that don’t exist: the future and the past.
But how do we experience time? It ‘feels’ as though the present has some short duration. One second? One heartbeat? Or one breath? Maybe it’s an illusion, but it feels as though the present is not a dimensionless membrane between past and future; that it has some thickness. Perhaps we need this illusion for consciousness to exist.