How does the past exist ? Does "the" past exist?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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Inspired by physics, many philosophers presuppose that the future and the past are symmetrical. In terms of the number line, the past is (-\infty,0), the future is (0,\infty). Of course the punctiform present can then only be \{0\}.

We automatically speak of the past. While we may debate what actually happened, we tend to presuppose that something actually happened.

But perhaps the future, rather than mirroring the past, “dominates” or employs the past.

Here’s a wild moment in the work of C. S. Peirce:

How does the Future bear upon conduct? The answer is that future facts are the only facts that we can, in a measure, control; and whatever there may be in the Future that is not amenable to control are the things that we shall be able to infer, or should be able to infer under favorable circumstances.
…
It cannot be denied that acritical inferences may refer to the Past in its capacity as past; but according to Pragmaticism, the conclusion of a Reasoning proper must refer to the Future.
…
For its meaning refers to conduct, and since it is a reasoned conclusion must refer to deliberate conduct, which is controllable conduct. But the only controllable conduct is Future conduct.
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Thus, a belief that Christopher Columbus discovered America really refers to the Future.

In other words, inquiry only cares about the past through its care about the future.

For instance, political factions argue about the past in order to achieve desired policies in the nascent future.

Likewise, scientific statements about even the pre-sentient past are only empirical through the implications of those statements for future measurements. The big bang tells us about the future, not the past. Those who have read After Finitude may detect an understated correlationist response to Meillassoux here.

Cynical readers may recall this from 1984 :

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past. . . . The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc… The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

Yet Peirce’s approach becomes less absurd the more one abandons, if only for a moment, the “we talk” that aims at the POV of an atemporal “god.” For this vaguely imagined and yet so familiar “god,” the future is perhaps already sketched but occluded. Or perhaps the present is the pencil that extends the line of the past into the blankness of the future, converting that indeterminate blankness into an extension of that unerasable line.

Putting “the” past into question is absurd ! But absurd in relation to what assumptions ? Are such assumptions unshakable ? If so, that itself is fascinating. Must there be the past ?

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If eternalism is incorrect then the progression of time is like the act of counting. It’s impossible to have counted from -\infty to 0, and so it’s impossible for time to have progressed from -\infty to 0. Therefore, the past must be finite.

If presentism is incorrect then yes. The universe doesn’t just have three spatial dimensions but also a fourth temporal dimension. Just as objects in front of and behind me exist but don’t exist here, future and/or past objects exist but don’t exist now.

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Past exists in the form of records, archives and memories. Past is also the causes of the effects of now. Now is the effects of the past. Without the past, there is no present.

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If we are saying that the here and now, the present, exists, that this very moment you are now reading this has being, or is being, then, with this sense of being, how can the past or the future exist, or, be, at all?

The past is what once was but no longer is. ‘It is past’, also means it is not now, it is no longer present (and these mean ‘it is not’). We have to, in our minds, presently place ideas and recollections on a timeline prior to now, but this is a present mental activity. We don’t look into a past that is here now to look at.

The future is what will be, but cannot be now, or it would be the present. The future is like present possibility, or existing potentiality. Once the future possibilities become actual, they are present and begin to exist.

This doesn’t mean the dinosaurs didn’t exist. It means they don’t exist now. Fossils exist now. We can imagine a now that is 160 million years ago. But the things we presently imagine cannot “exist” in the basic sense of exist, or we wouldn’t be imagining 160 million years ago, we would be experiencing today.

“Was” is different than “is”.

“Is” is ontological first and epistemological second.

“Was” and “will be” are more mixed with the epistemological than “is” needs to be. Was and will be are more ideal useful to construct ideas in the present, like “past” and “future”.

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……and I disagree the past exists, which makes how it exists, unintelligible.

How the past receives its conceptual validity, on the other hand, may be merely to facilitate a regressive series of empirical conditions.

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I’m currently wondering if C.S Peirce thought of the tenses “past”, “present” and “future” as indexicals that respectively point at what he called secondness (static, persistent actuality), firstness (direct sensation, dynamics and possibility), and thirdness (necessity and conditional expectation).

Perhaps Peirce was a type of presentist who considered sensations and the modality of possibility to be ontologically primal, and hence first.

Accordingly, a reader of a newspaper might be interpreted as follows:

The actual newspaper itself would be a sign to the reader, who interprets the object of the newspaper as concerning the secondness that the reader refers to as “previous events”, which causes the reader to contemplate upon the thirdness of the newspaper’s implications.

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Can you say more ? This sounds like some agreement with Peirce.

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Yes. He reminds me of Heidegger in the quote passaged.

Not “time is” but “Dasein qua time temporalizes its being.” Time is not something which is found outside somewhere as a framework for world events. Time is even less something which whirs away inside in consciousness. It is rather that which makes possible the being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in, that is, which makes possible the being of care.

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Right. Let us grant that the-past-for-me exists somehow. Surely what “has been” plays a role in what “is.” For instance, I pick up Being and Time and I can read it, because I have learned English. It even makes sense to me, more or less. Because I have put time into understanding phenomenologically. So in some sense the-past-for-me is entangled in the present.

But as you read this sentence, you anticipate the wholeness of a meaning that is still arriving. So the present involve anticipation, or the nascent future.

Right. So what exactly is possibility ?

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This is the sane, typical view. But can you make a case for the past ?

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In your own view, does the future already exist ? In a determinate form ?

An analogue of the block universe might be a VHS tape that contains the whole movie, from beginning to end. But I have to watch the movie to make that already determinate ending present.

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Dunno about Pierce; he kinda fills the bill when you asked me what it is to appropriate a text. Pierce started out a Kantian, then read into the Critiques what Kant didn’t intend, hence my mention of presumptuousness. To wit, Kant’s reflexive judgement became Pierce’s abduction, a priori formalism became Pierce’s pragmaticism, and so on. Hell, he even changed the range and grouping of the categories, fercrissakes!!! Firstness? Secondness? Really???
(We shall overlook that Kant did the same to Aristotle.)
(Sigh)
——————-

The past is not itself a time, and not to be reified into representing one. The past is merely an inference for validating historical continuity, for the simple reason direct experience, and thereby proper knowledge of it, is impossible.

A matter of linguistic convenience (the past) overriding cognitive functionality (deductive inference).

Does that sound like the agreement you mentioned?

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One’s birth exists as the past of one’s life. Without the birth taken place some time in the past of one’s life, one’s present NOW wouldn’t exist.

So, one’s present existence is the manifestation of his past. The present existence which is both mental state and physical body is made from and transformed from his original body and mind from the event of his birth.

One’s present mental state would be filled with the contents of memories from his lived past. One’s present physical body would be full of the signs of biological aging up to his age. Hence his physical and mental being itself is the past of his life.

It seems to be telling us that the past is hidden behind the present.

One’s own future also exist in a determinate form. Consider a death of oneself, as a biological living being will happen in the future, and most evidently and inevitably already exists as the future.

Not sure if above is making sense. Maybe you could clarify the difference between past, a past and the past.

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I think that’s what our best scientific theories suggest, e.g. special relativity. I’m also inclined to think that spacetime is discrete (as despite the alleged mathematical “solutions”, I think Zeno’s paradoxes and other supertasks like Thomson’s lamp show that continuous space and/or time can’t work), e.g. as in loop quantum gravity — which I believe also suggests that eternalism is true.

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I think that any discussion with time as the subject, like this one, needs to proceed within some established parameters, or else it will spread itself all over the place. That is because our inclinations about the nature of time, and our approaches to this subject, are widely varied.

I propose that we must start with the present, as you did here in the op, because that is where our experience provides us with substance. From this ‘point’ we can either look toward future or toward past. The presence of the past is as memory, and the presence of the future is as anticipation. But you will see that the way we look, how we prioritize the direction, (either backward toward the past, or forward toward the future), is heavily conditioned by the way that we conceive of the present. So for example, Peirce’s pragmatism conditioned him to prioritize the future.

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Does “the present” refer to a singular instant in time, such that the “length” of the present is 0? Or is the present an extended period of time, e.g the Planck time?

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I have no idea!

The point is, “the present” is another way of saying “what is”.

So the past and future, since they are not present, also can be said to not exist.

Certainly. We entangle it by seeing what was as causing or otherwise related to what is. But causation and relation are only seen in minds, by minds. We don’t see or hear or sense that my great-grandfather’s dna lives today - we see me living today and can mentally reconstruct the past as mental hypothesis and look at the hypothesis, or, recollection, in my present consciousness today.

What exists is always in the present.

The past isn’t an object, or a time that contains objects, like the present is an object or a time that contains objects.

Past and future, as times we can recall or imagine now, only exist in minds AFTER, there are minds to conjure them up presently.

Possibility - some kind of withheld actuality. Need to read Aristotle and Newton and everything scientific written since around 1850 to give you a better answer.

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Heidegger treats the ‘having been’ as already changed by the future towards which we comport ourselves.

In the way that I address what comes toward me, I see what is present and what has been. The present world is arranged and organized around the possible threat of a future atomic bomb explosion. Accordingly, what has been [the past] is seen as being “incapable” of confronting this fact, as the world that is still incapable of this confrontation [the present], or as the world in which all this is being prepared [the future]. For example, only from the future threat of the atomic bomb can one also see the significance of the step taken by Galileo. Everything begins with the future!(Heidegger, Zollicon)

Eugene Gendlin approach to temporality echoes Heidegger’s:

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“…the past functions to “interpret” the present,…the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”.

Compare the above with Heidegger:

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment [my experience of something ‘as’ something], and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”

The returning from a totality of relevance in the act of understanding something constitutes temporality not as a present object happening IN time but as temporalization.

“Temporalizing does not mean a “succession” of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein “occurs out of its future”.“Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general.” Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.

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Heidegger treats the ‘having been’ as already changed by the future towards which we comport ourselves.

In the way that I address what comes toward me, I see what is present and what has been. The present world is arranged and organized around the possible threat of a future atomic bomb explosion. Accordingly, what has been [the past] is seen as being “incapable” of confronting this fact, as the world that is still incapable of this confrontation [the present], or as the world in which all this is being prepared [the future]. For example, only from the future threat of the atomic bomb can one also see the significance of the step taken by Galileo. Everything begins with the future!(Heidegger, Zollicon)

Eugene Gendlin approach to temporality echoes Heidegger’s:

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“…the past functions to “interpret” the present,…the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”.

Compare the above with Heidegger:

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment [my experience of something ‘as’ something], and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”

The returning from a totality of relevance in the act of understanding something constitutes temporality not as a present object happening IN time but as temporalization.

“Temporalizing does not mean a “succession” of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein “occurs out of its future”.“Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general.” Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.

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I think it’s quite clear that the present cannot be a point, because that point would be gone as soon as it arrived. And, because our experience of the present consists of memories of the past, and anticipation of the future, and “present” is defined by our experience, then the present must consist of both past and future. This implies that the present does have temporal extension.