Were cognition to play such a role, then in a literal sense, its most universal models of temporal reality would become identical to the reality being modeled. Time would become cognition, and space would become a system of geometric relations that evolves by distributed cognitive processing. Appropriately enough, it is called the Cognition-Theoretic Model of the Universe , or CTMU for short. Better yet, it bestows on human consciousness a level of meaning that was previously approached only by religion and mysticism. And so the circle closes.
Time becomes a cosmogonic loop whereby the universe creates itself.
The origin of our time concept, the self, becomes the origin of time itself. And all this because of a little garden slug.