There have recently been a number of postings on the nature of time. I believe it started with Pat Hayes who was bothered by the asymmetry between space and time: One can stand still in space but not in time. This seems to be mysterious to a number of JCS participants. It is actually not that mysterious. Ever since Newton and his second law of motion there has been a good understanding of why things aren't frozen in time. Given a state of the universe there are forces between atoms and these forces cause the atoms to change their motion. This dynamical law of motion was changed by quantum mechanics in that Schroedinger's equation or Feynman type action principles governed the dynamics (behavior in time) of the world.
Understanding how systems evolve in time has been a great success story in physics for more than 300 years. The reason behind the Feynman rules can be considered to be mysterious, but that is quite different from several recent postings that imagined that present physics didn't have a good understanding of why systems are forced to keep changing in time.
The brain, of course is also a physical system so it too (and the mind) must evolve in time.
There are other issues connected with the direction of time's arrow that brings in considerations of entropy and issues about the asymmetrical boundary conditions of our universe (the big bang initial conditions are responsible for our low entropy beginning that gives time a unique direction). But I don't think that was what Hayes' original question was about.
Stan Klein
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