Present Time Does Not Exist

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Not for the Faint Hearted

There is no NOW or PRESENT and certainly no FUTURE, everything, our very life is HISTORY.
The screen you are looking at is history.

Since light travels at a finite speed - 186,282 miles per second - it takes time for it to bounce from the screen to your eye. When you see a word or image, you are seeing it as it looked some time in the past.
The image of a book you are reading or on your PC screen takes about 1 nanosecond or one billionth (1,000,000,000) of a second to reach your eye. You are seeing everything in the past - it is accumulated history. The PRESENT cannot exist, since time is continuous.

The illusion of PRESENT is the mathematical integral of time "dt" between infinity and the time taken at the speed of light for the image to reach your eye, it all becomes MEMORY.

The illusion of PRESENT = MEMORY = HISTORY

Those accumulated increments of infinitesimal time are conveniently transformed by us into seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years to constitute the illusion of a PRESENT and a positive PAST. We are actually all living in the past.

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@Beaker17,

I prefer to think that there is only the PRESENT which leaves a trail of MEMORY. And it is only through MEMORY that we recognize the passing of time.

And perhaps time doesn't exist at all, and the PRESENT is just the crest of a probability wave which produces CHANGE and gives the APPEARANCE of the passing of time when perceived through our memory.

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@Beaker17,

Quote:

There is no NOW or PRESENT ...

I suggest you investigate the word 'is' . Mathematical modelling doesn't constitute 'is-ness'. You might find that 'is-ness' equates to 'what matters to humans in particular contexts' . (Heidegger's Being and Time IS a useful reference in that respect Wink

)

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@Beaker17,

it makes sense but, i think that we are the ones who created time and , numbers ..
in the first place and I belive that we are not leaving history but experiencing the present moment through our body ,look at it from the perspective of a blind man or a deaf person

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@Beaker17,

I am typing this in the present. You are reading it in the future.

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@maxdancona,

No I'm not.

1 Reply

@roger,

In that case, you took an awfully long time to respond.

1 Reply

@rosborne979,

rosborne979 wrote:

I prefer to think that there is only the PRESENT which leaves a trail of MEMORY. And it is only through MEMORY that we recognize the passing of time.

True, but it's also true that everything you interact with in the present has been manifest in some way through past causalities.

So the present is made up of remnants of the past.

The past doesn't technically exist still, except what is left over of it, including our memories.

Really, though, neither 'past' nor 'present' exist in the sense we think of them; because they are just relative to each other as referential concepts. All that really exists are things themselves. Moments in time are not like places that continue to exist after you leave them so you can revisit them later. So you can't say that the present becomes the past or even that the present exists as a continuously updating frame of existence. It is just a way of referring to things temporally in reference to memories and future projections.

If you had the same shoes yesterday as today, then those shoes have existed and continue to do so. There was not a past with different shoes than the present. It's the same pair of shoes whose existence persists while other things come into go out of existence, such as a sneeze.

The irony is that preservation of the past is so important precisely because it doesn't actually exist. If we would waste loads of energy constantly changing and updating everything, it would not only be a terrible increase in entropy; but it would alienate us from our own memories and thus our ability to gain a sense of deliverance and distance from past suffering.

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@maxdancona,

Sorry. I read it in the present.

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roger wrote:

Max, I see it now. You are correct. Thank you.

No problem roger. You are welcome.

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Sorry guys but this is all philosophical twaddle !
The OP implies that the phrase 'at the present time' has no meaning, which is blatantly false. All meanings are context bound. The fact that we can deconstruct any concept by removing it from context and putting it under a microscope is a truism.
If you really want to play with 'time', look no further than Rovelli who points out that before and after, are as parochially relative as 'up' and 'down' (faint hearted take your pills !)...little wonder as the parameter t can be eliminated from frontier physics!

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Sorry guys but this is all philosophical twaddle !

I thought that was a given.

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@rosborne979,

True, but apparently not according to the OP which uses the phrase, 'not for the faint hearted.'

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Sorry guys but this is all philosophical twaddle !

Judging relevance is philosophical twaddle. Philosophical twaddle is at the foundations of all conceptual thought. Without it, we would be dumb animals.

Quote:

The OP implies that the phrase 'at the present time' has no meaning, which is blatantly false. All meanings are context bound. The fact that we can deconstruct any concept by removing it from context and putting it under a microscope is a truism.

Everything means what it means, but contextual shifts and other subtle amplifications of misunderstanding plague human cultural interactions.

Quote:

If you really want to play with 'time', look no further than Rovelli who points out that before and after, are as parochially relative as 'up' and 'down' (faint hearted take your pills !)...little wonder as the parameter t can be eliminated from frontier physics!

Cited authors/works should not be endpoints in the search for meaningful thought, but rather stopping points to gather supplies/fuel in order to gain impetus for further exploration and evaluation of ideas and knowledge.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Quote:

Everything means what it means

I see you've been taking Semantics 101 !

Oh, and please feel free to continue where I left off at the Rovelli filling station.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Quote:
Everything means what it means

I see you've been taking Semantics 101 !

In other words, nothing is meaningless unless it is rhetoric devoid of meaning. False meaning is still a type of meaning.

Really, though, even intentionally-meaningless rhetoric is meaningful insofar as it influences the reader.

Is that clearer than saying, "everything means what it means?"

Quote:

Oh, and please feel free to continue where I left off at the Rovelli filling station.

What else do you want to discuss about relative terms that only have meaning in reference to something else? Welcome to the world of prepositions.

[/quote]

1 Reply

@livinglava,

About as clear as mud ! Very Happy

This discussion (prefaced with the comment 'not for the faint hearted) is about 'the non existence of the present' on a mathemically trivial basis equivalent to the non-cessation of clock time. Rovelli's deeper mathematical analysis implies that no 'tenses' have absolute physical 'existence' (past, present or future) and that since 'before' and 'after' are relative to observer reference frame, then 'causality' is also relative to those frames.

My point is that the first issue, about 'the present' only, is epistemologically vacuous. But the more inclusive issue, involving all aspects of 'time' as potentially illusiory, is both epistemologically and ontologically significant.

In short, 'time issues' have zero 'meaning' in everyday social contexts, but 'significant meaning' in philosophical contexts. I assert that it is only with respect to that semantic distinction that the phrase 'not for the faint hearted' is contextually applicable.

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@Beaker17,

Beaker17 wrote:

The PRESENT cannot exist, since time is continuous.

I'm not sure I get this. How does time being continuous imply that there is no present? It implies that the present is infinitesimal in duration, but not that it doesn't exist.

1 Reply

@Brandon9000,

Indeed !

As I've said above, there is neither an epistemological nor an ontological issue, regarding normal usage of the word 'present' .

(As for more general issues of 'existence' I refer readers to my view expressed elsewhere in my posting history that the meaning of 'existence', like any other word, is not absolute, but relative to context).

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

About as clear as mud !

This discussion (prefaced with the comment 'not for the faint hearted) is about 'the non existence of the present' on a mathemically trivial basis equivalent to the non-cessation of clock time. Rovelli's deeper mathematical analysis implies that no 'tenses' have absolute physical 'existence' (past, present or future) and that since 'before' and 'after' are relative to observer reference frame, then 'causality' is also relative to those frames.

My point is that the first issue, about 'the present' only, is epistemologically vacuous. But the more inclusive issue, involving all aspects of 'time' as potentially illusiory, is both epistemologically and ontologically significant.

In short, 'time issues' have zero 'meaning' in everyday social contexts, but 'significant meaning' in philosophical contexts. I assert that it is only with respect to that semantic distinction that the phrase 'not for the faint hearted' is contextually applicable.

After telling me what I said was clear as mud, you go on to post a complexified version of what you said before.

I guess that means you don't want to discuss ideas as much as ridicule what's not yours in order to elevate yours in contrast.

I'm more interested in discussion.

1 Reply

Present Time Does Not Exist

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