Time may be a construction of our perception as opposed to a physical reality. I do not believe this, but nonetheless I would like to explore the idea.

We may learn something about time by considering the differences between our own world of three dimensions, length, width, and depth, and that of Flatland that has only two dimensions of length and width. Flatlanders lack the dimension of depth.

Imagine for a moment two-dimensional Flatlanders thinking about a three-dimension ball from our world. They do not have the hardware to perceive ballness directly, so they might attempt to comprehend it by sequencing slices. If they organize the slices as they would appear from one side of the ball to the other, then their perception of the ball would be a point appearing in their world, becoming a small circle, expanding, contracting, becoming a point again, and then disappearing.

This model of the Flatlanders does not fully describe a three dimensional ball, but it may be one way for them to cope with the limitations of their two-dimensional perceptions. They would generate an illusion of time to explain the three-dimensional nature of ballness. While we need no time-like quality to explain the ball, for Flatlanders the ball exists as a two-dimensional object changing in time.

In the same way, we who exist in a three-dimensional universe might generate an illusion of time to explain a four-dimensional object. It would not fully describe the nature of this object, but it might be as close as we could come to understanding it. We would experience a four dimensional ball as a point appearing in our universe, becoming a small three-dimensional ball, expanding, contracting, becoming a point again, and vanishing.

The implication for us would be that the past, present, and future states of this object exist all at the same moment.