For us, which is what we always seem to be speaking about, the present extends for an entire lifetime. It is always the present, and it always includes traces of the past and expectations of the future.
On the other hand, if we accept Einstein’s Relativity, there is now for me and now for you, there are infinitely many local ‘nows’, but no universal cross-cosmic now. So, eternalism looks to be a sensible view―all pasts, presents and futures exist eternally. From the perspective of this view, to ask, ‘but does this mean the future has already happened’ is incoherent.
I tend to agree, though I’d stress that the present itself is a concern about the future.
For instance, I don’t care about “laws” of nature that stopped functioning yesterday. I need to decide what to do. The past has its “being” within this needing-to-decide. Something like that.
To me I think Peirce agrees with the fundamental human situation. Even a historian works toward the future publication of his book. He or she is concerned about being recognized as worthy by peers at the next convention.
Joe says I was born in 1979. Billy says I was born in 1883, but injected with a serum that slows the aging process. I myself, in this example, can’t remember anything from more than 5 years ago. Billy says that’s a side-effect of the serum.
This latest thread on Western Secularism and Christianity is a good example of the past functioning as tool toward this or that future. I use and insist on my version of the past toward getting what I want, which might be the recognition of my team’s flag as higher on the flagpole.
The idea of a relative or presently available past does not seem strange to me. If the past no longer has any influence on the future, one could say that it does not exist as such.
It is also clear to me that the past can be changed. Power often rewrites the past, and personal experiences can also change it; as a result, this new past becomes more real than the physical one. Although, what does “real” mean here? After all, the past always depends on interpretation, while the past in its full completeness has obviously been destroyed.
I am coming to the conclusion — although Kant also wrote something on this subject — that human perception of the past is merely an instrument of our reason.
Right. The past weirdly gets its being from the future. Lately I had to order a birth certificate, proof of some event in “the past,” in order to secure a driver’s license, a credential awaiting me in the desired future.
I’d even question this “past in its full completeness” as more than a kind of limit concept. We tend to think of the world as f : T \to S, where f(t_0) is a complete snapshot of the world at time t_0. But this looks to me like an analogy or metaphor. “The world is a videogame.” Or "the world is a film viewed implicitly by “God.” Then the game becomes speaking as God would speak, speaking for God.
What is “closer to us” is “my past” or “your past.” I mean the-past-according-to-you and the-past-according-to-me. Even here we have idealizations, limit concepts. For I don’t exactly remember even my own experience, and my learned beliefs about the shared past are sketchy and largely uncertain. Indeed, philosophy can lead me to question the concept of “the (universal) past” as a useful assumption which, upon close investigation, is semantically deficient or even incoherent.
In recent years, I have been working a great deal on the concept of time–gaze–power, in which I consider these three notions to be inseparably connected.
Newtonian time and determinism have been implanted too deeply into our consciousness. It seems to us that the world is absolutely determined and calculable, and that time is linear in both directions. I am convinced that this is not the case.
The time of the ancients — time as judgment, debt, punishment, and uncertainty — may be closer to the truth.
I tend to agree. The Newtonian version of absolute space and absolute time is like the tacit video game religion that many young men start with as they begin to do philosophy. IMV, this is an alienated starting point, partially explicable by the prestige earned by technology in the very qualitative lifeworld that is insincerely derealized as the interior of a matrix or cave.
It is incoherent but common to lift up this Newtonian vision as making that lifeworld basically unreal or epiphenomenal. It’s using the evidence to prove the unreliability of the evidence. Weirdly it’s just the alienation of this philosophy that protects it from detection as insincere.
Because I act in the world of debt and reputation and ambiguity — merely murmuring my crystalline Newtonian pieties now and then as a kind of prayer — these prayers never collide with the dominant, practical me. This alienated philosophy is escapist to begin with. One may come to object to it on aesthetic-ethical grounds as phony, as disconnected from who I mostly am.
You are right that Newtonian time is a kind of religion, although it is regarded as something objective and external. But it is not an objective external reality; it is merely a characteristic of the secular modernist god.
The time of mystics and poets — time as a madman, an executioner, and a collector of debts — is in fact much more intelligible bodily and existentially.
Here we may differ. I don’t understand experience as mind-stuff. Instead experience is world-from-POV. This POV-ness gets misread as internality. The lifeworld in its significance is, IMV, prior to every metaphysical attempt to “reduce” it or “internalize” it.
The present embodies the past, so to speak, as (its) consequence – in this sense, the past is ontological? or epistemological? (either way ineluctable) – while simultaneously dissipating (or filtering-out) all possible futures but one.
Good to see you, @180Proof . We’ve talked many times over the years.
I’m with you on consequences, but where is the reasoning taking place ? Here and now we understand the now in terms of consequences, and yet we argue for different versions of the past in terms of the compatibility of inferred consequences with possible perceptions. ‘This thing isn’t 2000 years old, because there’s too much radioactive carbon in it.’ This itself depends on current science. “Back then they misunderstood radiactive decay, so they misdated various artefacts.”
It is not certain that the past is fixed. We can be sure about some things, but not about everything. The same applies to the future: there are things that will definitely happen, but there are also possible alternatives.
For me the basic idea is that here and now I am faced with a future that I can partially control. What should I do ?
In a murder trial, “the” past is established or solidified in order to punish or release a suspect. If you have a jury, “the” past is not even announced in detail but simplified as a “punish” or “let go.” Jurors need not trust the same witnesses but only agree on a single bit of information.
We might hope that the jurors apply the standards they would have applied to them in the future.