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+--- Thread: On the objective existence/persistence of the past (/thread-13435.html)
On the objective existence/persistence of the past - Magical Realist - Jan 2, 2023
It is often assumed that the only reason the past persists as "having happened" is because of memories. That without memories there would be no sign of the past. But doesn't it persist in itself, as a state of "having been"?
There is something that memories are about. They are brain generated traces of events that really happened to us, and these events exist forever in a mode of no longer happening.
The past also endures in other things beside memories, as traces or vestiges of changes made in the universe including those in our own brains. If the past didn't persist in some sense, we would not be able to remember it. We remember largely by being reminded of something in the past by the present. It is part of factity that the past once occurred, only as the present, and yet lies concealed under the present situation.
Does the past exist objectively and independently of us? I believe it does. Indeed, isn't the whole ability to be an objectively existent thing part of now being in the past, as something in-itself and complete?
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson
RE: On the objective existence/persistence of the past - C C - Jan 2, 2023
Yah, information about and effects of the past are still retained in the environment (brain memory itself is subsumed by that broader category). And the past was as objective as whatever the present is supposed to be (i.e., a train wreck, despite the specious portrayal as ideal/absolute).
A putative objective "now" embracing a change to a subatomic particle would have a ridiculously shorter duration than the "elephant-sized" now outputted by brain cognition.
The brain receives stimulation from distant as well as rapidly occurring events which actually happened at different times. But for practical purposes the brain blurs them together and creates a milliseconds-in-duration "now" that fictionally represents those events as belonging to the same fleeting moment of represented being.
Some 19th and early 20th scientists and philosophers were less dogmatic than those of today, via recognizing that "objective" doesn't have to refer to or be dependent upon a metaphysical or non-represented manner of existence.
It can instead refer to the coherence of extrospective affairs behaving independently of one's immediate will and wishes (desires), conforming to rules/laws, and the consensus of other observers vouching that they experience those same things in their presentations of an external environment (objectivity falling out of inter-subjectivity).
Different web browsers pretty much depict or render information objects (files, docs, icons, apps, etc) the same way (i.e., global agreement), even though what's on the screen and coming out of the speakers isn't the way those objects exist at the software/hardware level. And alternatively and in theory, there could be a panphenomenal reality like David Hume's and Ernst Mach's where phenomena (the screen and speaker stuff) have no material or metaphysical counterparts (corresponding to the hidden, technological stratum of computers). Wherein those manifestations or their qualitative properties are not representational at all, and are prior-in-rank to even their contingent configuration or bundling as "minds".