Does the present exist?

Question

Some philosopher that I cant recall now once said that in order for the now to exist, an infinite amount of time had to pass. And since an infinite amount of time will never pass, we are not presently in the present. Its all an illusion. What do you think? And can anyone remember who said that?

Answer 1

i don't understand the logic of that argument you mentioned. i don't see why an infinite amount of time has needed to pass for there to be a present. tim has a beginning and as soon as it began there was a present.

truly in order to decide whether there is a present you need to define what present is. because from a physics perspective there is not really a universal present, since time is a function of your velocity in comparison to another body's.

but as for me a being in the same time frame as every other being on this planet, we can distinguis and exact moment as time is passing, and the moment that is right now, is the present.

i suppose from  a philoso-hy point of view the difficulty of the present in that sense is that it can be or must be infinitely small. smaller than human beings can differentiate between. so in that sense there is not really a present, because you would eventually get down to precisions at the quantum level and at this level things are different. so i think we loosely refer to the present as basically the moment we are aware of, in the precise sense, or sometimes even the current period in history, the current year.

present is a word that means something and is defined in the dictionary, by that definition it is something and exists. when you start changing or requiring more precision in your definition you can run into trouble. so truly before you can answer your question, you need to establish exactly what it is you mean by present.

Answer 2

Everything you see is reaching you at the speed of light and everything you feel takes a certain amount of time to be registered by your brain, so we only actually EXPERIENCE what has already happened.

I don't regard it as pholosophy but rather as physics.

Answer 3

That philosopher would have to prove their claim that "in order for the now to exist, an infinite amount of time had to pass" before they could base any kind of philosophical argument on that hypothesis. I don't see anyone proving the first claim, therefore the second claim can not be taken as legitimate.

Answer 4

you can not reside in the past nor the future

there is only the eternil moment of the present now

Its a gift Thats why its called present

its your moment to choose who you shall be come

No reason to dwell in the past nor live in the future

because the past is a memory fragmented pieces of what really happend and tomorrow is only a thought of what is hoped to be

John Lennon said life is what happens while your planning tomorrow or reliving yesterday

so live in the let go stay in the moment and enjoy the aspects of all three coming to gather to be the universes Present to you

Answer 5

Sounds like a variation of the Zeno of Elea.   Zeno lived "circa 495*circa 430 B.C.  A Greek philosopher; famed for paradoxes that contributed to development of logical rigor."

If that is the philosopher, his argument was that motion wasn't possible because it would take an infinite number of finite periods of time prior to the result to arrive at the resulting now.  Another variation of his paradox is the race between Achilles and a tortoise where the tortoise is given a head start and Achilles never can catch up.  And a third variation is of the impossibility of an arrow ever reaching its target.

The flaw in Zeno's arguments was resolved when mathematics demonstrated that an infinite summation of finite lengths of anything could result in a finite length.  Zeno assumed that it had to be infinite, not finite.   Infinite series mathematics was developed in the 1800s.

Most students study infinite series in pre-calculus courses in high school now.   They are fun to play around with.

Answer 6

I don't know him but I know the present exists because we are living it

we are not living the past ,because it is gone ,we are not living the future because we don't know it yet. But we know the present.

Answer 7

It is quite possible for there to have been an infinite amount of time before now. If you studied geometry then you should know that a half line (a.k.a. a ray) is infinitely long even though it terminates at one point. Going away from that point it is infinitely long in one direction.

Consider that to be the past. In the other direction you could have an infinitely long dotted line which represents an eternal future which does not yet exist, but no doubt will (moment by moment). Those are physical representations which are meant to assist in how time does not have a beginning. But the eternal now is actually like the abstract point in geometry which has no dimension, because if the now covered anything more than a zero dimensional amount of time, then it would include some of the past (and surely the past exists in current memory). Alan Watts called it "Nowever". So, actually time does not pass. And it doesn't sit still since it isn't anything physical either. In a way it is coninually turning into the future without ever ceasing to be the past.

Here is a copy of one of my other answers to another question about time:

The mentioning of the end of time in the Bible is to me nonsense which is out of touch with reality. I'm not saying that this world won't at some time in the future come to an end.

We develop concepts about everything of which we are aware. That does not mean that our perception and hence the concept are accurate. The dictionary defines eternity as beginningless and endless time. Anything which does not have a beginning cannot cease to exist. But time is not physical because it is not spatial. It is the constant duration of the eternal now. But there is no past to go to and the future does not yet exist. Yet, there will be a future "now" because the now is not anything physical and therefore cannot cease to exist. All of the ways in which we have to measure time, such as clocks, are actually movements within space (even if it is an atomic clock, it is based on physical changes) which we intuitively along with our nervous system seem to move in consistently regular movements. But those movements are actually changes within time and not time itself. Even if there were no physical movements (changes), the continuation of a perfectly still universe would be during a time period. There just wouldn't be any way to measure that amount of time, because the only way we have of measuring time is anywhere from years (the revolutions of the earth around the sun) to the method of measuring time with an atomic clock (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_cloc... where it is the movement of radiation which is used.

  

Answer 8

You may be thinking of the paradoxes of Zeno.

Zeno, one of the pre-Socratics, wasn't trying to prove that the "present" doesn't exist, although that may be implied in his reasoning. You may have heard some form of his arguments to the effect that change and motion are impossible.

Assume I fire an arrow. In order for the arrow to get to its target, it has to pass the midpoint. In order to get there, it has to pass the quarterpoint. And so on and so forth. Since it has to pass an infinite number of points, it would take an infinite amount of time for the arrow to get to the target.

Furthermore, Zeno said, since this is true of ANY target, however close it may be placed to the archer, we reach the surprising conclusion that nothing every gets anywhere. So there is no reality to change or motion.

Or (maybe he would say) time and the present.

Sound right?  

Answer 9

What we all commonly refer to as "the present" is that which we are collectively experiencing at this instant.  If you want to name it something else- ok.

There is a planet full of people who don't agree it's an illusion

Answer 10

What that really shows is that Being had no beginning and will have no end.  It shows that there is something incomprehensible at the basis of existence.  It shows that creation is impermanent.  You can say it's an illusion instead of impermanent, it's sort of the same idea, but what's really an illusion is the idea that anything within creation is permanent.  Westerners tend to want believe in this illusion, and when they see that it's not so, they tend to pronounce all of creation an illusion, but that sort of misses the point.

Answer 11

Time was created.  So there was a time (before time was created) in which no time was passing or needed to pass.  Then time was created, so that is all that is necessary for the present to exist.  Whatever time has passed from the time time was created to the present makes it the present.