I don't believe our sense of consciousness has the same intense feeling of position in space as it does a point in time. Perhaps that's just me and maybe this is more a philosophical/psychological question than it is one of physics.
There is a psychological aspect to that, which is the apparent continuity of identity. See below.
There is one other significant distinction between space and time. We cannot say that any point in space has absolute coordinates; no point can be identified as being in the center of the universe, for example. But -- we can and do say the universe is 13.75 ± 0.17 billion years old, which implies that, if our science were more exact, we could say that we are at a particular instant in time in the history of the universe. So, space coordinates are relative, time coordinates are absolute.
That's related to the reason time only goes in one direction, actually. I don't think it means time is absolute, but it does mean that at least near the point in spacetime where I'm typing this, there is a definite asymmetry in the time direction.
Thanks, Sol, for that perspective. However, I don't actually see "now" as simply the time analog of "here", except rather superficially.
To return to my CD analogy, there "appears" to be only one "read head" in time, moving more or less synchronously for all the conscious beings we encounter.
If my 'here' is at X, it's completely normal and expected for your 'here' to be at X+5, and somebody else's 'here' to be at X-27. (In fact, your X,Y,Z not only can but pretty much HAVE to be different than mine!). And we can and do all move our "here" freely around in X, forward, backward, crossing each other's X. So there's no special X.
In T, nobody seems to locate their "now" at T+5 or T-27. So far as we know, except in fiction nobody experiences the unfolding of the the universe a few hours earlier than others. We seem to have no choice except to all occupy the same T as our shared "now"; we can't each independently move our personal 'now' around in T. That single inflexibly moving time location which we all share as our "now" IS a very special T of which there is no analog in space.
Instead of thinking about a person, think of a computer program executing itself at some clock rate. At each tick of the clock its state changes, so it is a sequence of discrete states, separated in time. To make things easier to picture, imagine the computer is a 2D "flatland" computer, an infinitely thin slice.
Now imagine instead of being separated in time, the computer's states are separated in space. There are a trillion copies of the slice-computer, separated from each other by one meter in the 3rd direction. Naturally, you are now thinking of those other slices as
different computers existing at the same time, when you thought of the slices in time as the
same computer at different times. But why do you think that? Let's go on....
Instead of separate disconnected slices separated in space, stack the slices continuously. As an observer moves along the tube of stacked slices in that third direction, every meter or so the state on the 2D slice suddenly changes (as it does in time for an ideal computer, when the clock ticks).
Now imagine the computer's state can and does change continuously as you move along the stack, just as a real computer's state does in time (as opposed to an ideal computer that's always in one of a set of discrete states).
Probably you can see that this tube is nearly a perfect analogy to the flow of time - except now it's a "flow" of space. "Now" is simply the slice "here". The computer could perfectly well be a (2D) person, with a mental and physical states that evolves in time - or in this 3rd direction.
A sense of time passing is represented in this tube if the sequence of mental states of the 2D person is such that they experience such a flow - that is, if the person at slice x=1 feels like the continuation of the person at slice x=0. It's our sense of continuity of identity, the sense that we are the same person we were yesterday, that creates the idea that time is fundamentally different from space.
If I step into a Star Trek transporter and (due to a glitch) two copies of me are produced, we'd think of those as two different people - but we think of ourselves yesterday as the same person, despite the fact that our yesterday self might be more different from us than our newly produced clone self. I think this psychological prejudice is what lies behind most of your question.
