In this study the temporal aspect of consciousness is analyzed. We start from the notion that while conscious experience seems to change constantly, yet for any contents of experience to be consciously perceived they must last for some non-zero duration of time, which appears to constitute a certain conflict... We posit that, in terms of phenomenological analysis of consciousness, the temporal aspect, and this apparent conflict in particular, is the most basic property, likely inherent to any conceivable form of consciousness. We then put forward arguments for the synaptic clock to be a content-specific neural substrate of consciousness, showing how it would correspond to this temporal aspect. This proposal is considered in light of the information integration theory of consciousness, and other theories that relate consciousness to processes of learning and memory. It is outlined how this can offer a concrete way of relating the properties of consciousness directly to the neural plasticity mechanisms of learning and memory. In this regard, we propose a viewpoint, in which an association between different contents of conscious experience can be created in a form of relational memory only if they occur at the very same moment of subjective time, with moments of subjective time having different durations depending on the type of information processed, proportional to the time units of corresponding synaptic clocks, and being in principle different for different brain regions and nervous systems in different animal species. Finally, using this viewpoint, we consider the two alternative views on the structure of consciousness, namely a static and a dynamic one, and argue in favor of the latter, proposing that consciousness can be best understood if change is considered its only dimension. (read more)