I recently read:
The past exists only in our memory. The future exists only in our plans.
Those two lines have been rattling around my head for a week. That would suggest to me that reality exists only now. However now only exists for a fleeting point in time and immediately becomes the past and influences the the future. Is it possible there is no now and therefore no reality?
I have a feeling there is some profound epiphany here, but I just can’t grasp it.
08 Feb 2010 at 08:46 pm | #
Well, yeah! How long do you think “now” lasts?
08 Feb 2010 at 08:47 pm | #
That is the point (I think)
08 Feb 2010 at 08:51 pm | #
Well, I was sort of assuming it was a Zeno’s Race kind of thing. But if you do that to time, is it like doing it to matter, and if so does the singularity collapse upon itself? Que could tell us, I’m sure.
08 Feb 2010 at 08:55 pm | #
Ah, Zeno’s paradoxes. Perhaps Stephen Hawking has something to say but I am not sure what is left of my brain can handle that.
08 Feb 2010 at 09:01 pm | #
The macro way of looking at may that God is said to exist in a single super eternal now. If I remember the analogy we were given, God has the whole film, we are locked into a single frame at a time. Fortunately religious studies pretty much ignored quantum theory, but you might enjoy a good book on Feynman that I have.
08 Feb 2010 at 11:21 pm | #
I don’t know that Past Present and Future can be separated when we think about the experience of the Now. The Now of a Haitian kid in a squatter camp extends back at least as far as the earthquake. Similarly, the groundwork for the future is laid in the present and in the past. I think of the Now as an organic thing that is part of a much larger continuum rather than something that exists in itself. Try thinking of the Now of la petite mort. I can’t do it.
Perhaps if I had understood Einstein or Hawking ...............
13 Feb 2010 at 03:14 pm | #
The Japanese have a word, ma, for this sort of thing.
Ma (negative space)—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)
13 Feb 2010 at 03:15 pm | #
Broken Link in previous, try --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)