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The construction of the objective present

#1
Magical Realist Offline
"In the words of the great scholar of Buddhism, Fyodor Shcherbatskoy: “Everything past is unreal, everything future is unreal, everything imagined, absent, mental . . . is unreal. . . . Ultimately real is only the present moment of physical efficiency.”

But really, is the present even real, in the sense of something that just objectively occurs? Think about it. You're sitting in the park gazing at a tree. The tree and you with it are conceived by you as happening all at the same time. You are embedded in this moment of immediacy. But were that so, would you even be able to experience the tree? The tree first of all is being. That presumably takes time. Then the light of the sun hits the tree reflected over to your eyes. That takes time too. Our eyes wander over the entirety of the tree and grasp it as one thing. One pattern or shape. Then it takes time for your brain to process those light signals as "tree standing over there."

The tree has to cause our own perception of it to be present to us. But by the time it does this what we construct as "there" isn't really the tree as it is in itself. It is a sensory-based construct of a touchable, seeable whole being AS IF it were unconstructed and occurring simultaneous to our moment of awareness. But this construct is AFTER the tree. It's in the past of the tree, projected out beyond us in a fictional time in which the tree and us and everything in the park is supposed to exist all at once.

The present is thus conceived as one static moment. A freezeframe of all things together at once. But such is impossible. Such a state would result in all things being eternally in the dark and solipsistically isolated from each other. There is no tree, me, the park, and the light waves at one moment. Being here and now is an accumulative process over time, an organic confluence of successive micro-instants creating the illusion of timeless simultaneous coexistence. The present is an illusory artifact of our own awareness, positing itself as a whole happening moment that never begins and never ends and contains everything as objectively present to us.

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson
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#2
C C Offline
(Feb 23, 2015 07:25 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] The present is thus conceived as one static moment. A freezeframe of all things together at once. But such is impossible. Such a state would result in all things being eternally in the dark and solipsistically isolated from each other. There is no tree, me, the park, and the light waves at one moment. Being here and now is an accumulative process over time, an organic confluence of successive micro-instants creating the illusion of timeless simultaneous coexistence. The present is an illusory artifact of our own awareness, positing itself as a whole happening moment that never begins and never ends and contains everything as objectively present to us. [...]

In physics and philosophy, there may never be enough resources to rescue the commonsense "present" from either its specious aura or its seeming dependence upon cognition. In [quote2] below, there's the patchwork of relativistic situations where a circumstance on Earth is two hundred years in the past or future compared to events on another planet 10 billion light years away. To globally fit the bill, Barbour's version of a "now" [quote1] has to somehow preserve all those Einsteinian quirks while also being a configuration state capturing the entire universe ("freezeframe").

- - - - - -

[1] JULIAN BARBOUR: "Plato... taught that the only real things are forms or ideas: perfect paradigms, existing in a timeless realm. In our mortal existence we catch only fleeting glimpses of these ideal forms. Now each point - each thing - in these 'countries' I have asked you to imagine could be regarded as a Platonic form. Triangles certainly are. I shall call the corresponding 'country' Platonia. The name reflects its mathematical perfection and timeless landscape. Nothing changes in Platonia. Its points are all the instants of time, all the Nows; they are simply there, given once and for all.

"[...] The proper way to think about motion is that the universe as a whole moves from one 'place' to another 'place', where 'place' means a relative arrangement, or configuration, of the complete universe. [...] It does not move in absolute space, it moves from one configuration to another. The totality of these places is its relative configuration space: Platonia. [...] no Sun rises or sets over that landscape to mark the walker's progress. The Sun, like the moving parts of any clock, is part of the universe. It is part of the walker...

"There is nothing outside the universe to time it as it goes from one place to another in Platonia - only some internal change can do that. But just as all markers are on an equal footing for defining position, so are all changes for the purposes of timing. [...] The history of the universe is the path. Each point on the path is a configuration of the universe. For a three-body universe, each configuration is a triangle. The path is just the triangles - nothing more, nothing less. With time gone, motion is gone..." --The End of Time

- - - - - -

[2] BRAIN GREENE: [...] To see what I mean, think of spacetime as a loaf of bread. Einstein realized that, just as there are different ways to cut a loaf of bread into individual slices, there are different ways to cut spacetime into individual "now" slices. That is, because motion affects the passage of time, someone who is moving will have a different conception of what's happening right now, and so they'll cut the loaf into different now slices. Their slices will be at a different angle.

DAVID KAISER: That person who's moving will, will tilt the knife, will be carving out these slices at a different angle. They won't be parallel to my slices of time.

BRIAN GREENE: To get a feel for the bizarre effect this can have, imagine an alien, here, in a galaxy 10-billion light years from Earth, and way over there, on Earth, the guy at the gas station. Now, if the two are sitting still, not moving in relation to one other, their clocks tick off time at the same rate, and so they share the same now slices, which cut straight across the loaf. But watch what happens if the alien hops on his bike and rides directly away from Earth.

Since motion slows the passage time, their clocks will no longer tick off time at the same rate. And if their clocks no longer agree, their now slices will no longer agree either.

The alien's now slice cuts across the loaf differently. It's angled towards the past. Since the alien is biking at a leisurely pace, his slice is angled to the past by only a miniscule amount. But across such a vast distance, that tiny angle results in a huge difference in time. So what the alien would find on his angled now slice—he considers as happening right now, on Earth—no longer includes our friend at the gas station, or even 40 years earlier when our friend was a baby.

Amazingly, the alien's now slice has swept back through more than 200 years of Earth history and now includes events we consider part of the distant past, like Beethoven finishing his 5th Symphony: 1804 to 1808.

DAVID KAISER: Even at a relatively slow speed we can have, actually, tremendous disagreements on our labeling of "now," what happens at the same time, if we're spread out far enough in space.

BRIAN GREENE: And if that's not strange enough, the direction you move makes a difference, too. Watch what happens when the alien turns around and bikes toward Earth. The alien's new "now slice" is angled to…toward the future, and so it includes events that won't happen on Earth for 200 years: perhaps our friend's great-great-great granddaughter teleporting from Paris to New York.

Once we know that your now can be what I consider the past, or your now can be what I consider the future, and your now is every bit as valid as my now, then we learn that the past must be real, the future must be real. They could be your now. That means past, present, future…all equally real; they all exist. --THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS: THE ILLUSION OF TIME
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