A little idea I thought about when I was studying Mahayana Buddhism alot.
We in society will always hold thoughts for the ages past and the looks of the future. It tells us what we’ve learned and where we’re going. But what if I were to say no time has come to pass, nor will ever come to pass because the only moment is now. Not a difficult thing to understand, but maybe difficult to accept.
Changing conditions and alterations of memory and experience drive the relevance of time. What can we find in this equation that is intangible and stable? What here is constant? Perhaps understanding what drives the nature of change is or how our minds respond to conditioning. Could we control conditioning?
With that being stated, you are living in a stagnated place of delusion. It’s as if we were to stare in a mirror our entire lives and see ourselves age before our eyes, while nothing has really changed…
We have the tools to imho [will etc], but yes it depends upon knowledge of how we are being conditioned and conditioning ourselves.
that’s only a stagnation if we don’t try to learn more and keep moving forwards, this is why wisdom is enlightenment.
I think we have to accept that we are not masters nor controllers of the world, we are part of something where everything else are equally involved in the equation. The desire to have total free will is really a desire for absolute dominance in our sphere of being/life, but to do that requires the control of everything that affects that ~ which ends up as quite a lot [govt, nature, other people etc].
…and so we come full circle as concerns your complaint, what creates what you are seeing as stagnation is perhaps the percentage of the world we cannot own or control. Perhaps that’s a good thing! ‘stagnation’ is a perspective, we only see it like that because we are hoping for some kind of emancipation or to otherwise arrive at a full and perfect self. It aint gonna happen. Nature is wiser than that.
this guy talks about what you’re talking about, which is Presentism (only the present exists). He also did a great paper on this theory of presentism known as Replacement Theory.
As far as we know, the past is neither existing, nor does it not exist, it existed. Existed is a unique category, it cannot be reduced to existing or does not exist, and we have proof of the existence of existed, proof in memory.
Some say all matter and energy has existed and will continue to exist, that it is only their location in space, that changes. This is what the evidence of our senses seem to suggest, but I’m open to the possibility that some things may appear and disappear ex nihilo. If things can change location, then why not their existence? Theoretically, it seems possible, but pratically, from experience, it doesn’t seem possible.
I don’t know, but this just seems to be arguing in a circle here. The past is neither existing(past) nor does not exist(present). And saying something existed, in the past, is something unique and can’t reduce it to what is present. But now we all of a sudden have proof of something that isn’t present, and this is memory. Question becomes, when do you have a memory? Is not the memory in the present? If it is in the present, then how can that prove something of the past and not something of the present?
The location of one thing changes, key word is changes. But more specifically, two things in your senses change location from one another, or where they “were” a moment before. Where you get the idea of space from, unknown. And the point would be something like this, “a lifespan can be divided into countless parts, each completely independent of the others, so that it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little while ago that I must exist now…the distinction between preservation and creation is only a conceptual one…” And this is more forceful if we realize that things are contingent (logically possible) and we can cut up experience into instants like we divide lines into parts. And it would follow that each instant in way is related to any previous instant, and there is no reason that things should keep going on in an orderly way. And yet contingent things just happen to follow one another. Yet we have no experience of the past or the future, which means we only have the experience of the present. And so if we hold to a past, it went out of existence and the future is not in existence. It moves from nothing to something, and then to nothing again. Pops into existence, exists, goes out of existence, created anew at each instant if it were to continue on in someway. Experience doesn’t seem to decide between these issues.
Maybe there is no present, or no precise present, maybe we experience motion directly. You cut things up into neat little bits- past,present, future, or you say we only experience the present, but what if we experience the past, past isn’t fully past, and what if we experience the future, future isn’t fully future?
What we experience is flow, I have no experience of this thing you call present, this artificial construct you use to freeze frame reality,cut it up into 3 pieces, in order to make it more comprehensible.
That is not to say there is no present, just that it is more ambiguous than you think it is.
I have memories indicating things have changed, have moved from place to place, I experience these memories in the present, yet they are past, I’m not sure I can explain what it feels like to perceive past, it would be like explaining the color red to a blind man, you have to experience it for yourself, and I’m assuming you have.
Perhaps you want a logical reason for why we should trust our memories, or how we know our memories are indeed memories, or a more precise definition of what memory is. What skeptic you are, I bet you’re hard to fool, eh? Won’t even trust your own memories, let alone someone else. Well, I have memories, or should I say, collections of sense data, sights, sounds, etc, of balls bouncing when I drop them on floors. I don’t have collections of sense data, sights, sounds, etc, of balls not, not bouncing when I drop them on floors. That’s thousands of images and sounds in favor of balls bouncing when I drop them on floors, vs 0 images and sounds of them doing something else when I drop them on floors. Hmmm, I think the images and sounds popping up when I see a ball are trying to tell me something about the nature of this ball, are connected with. I’m going to go with them, as I have nothing else to go on.
Yes I’ve had that thought before, if you prefer object disappearing and then reappearing in a slightly different place, then by all means, go with that, or object disappearing and another identical object taking its place, but ultimately we are merely describing the same phenomena in different ways, it is not an aspect of the phenomena itself, that is in question here, but the words we choose to describe it. This actually says more about you then the phenomena in question. That you choose to imagine yoursel dying everytime you move from point A to point B, and a new you, or not even you, someone else that looks, smells and tastes just like you has took your place, may something about your psycholgy. Do you have frequent identity crises and desires to obliterate your past and start anew, fresh as a daisy, and without all that heavy, unnecessary luggage you’ve been carrying around. Do you imagine yourself born anew, each day, with unlimited, God like potential?
Do you wish to live your life in the present like a snake, without a past or a future, without order, predictability, patterns, responsibilities, decisions, dilemmas, consequences, norms, and all the rest of that unpleasant business we call, being human?
We primarily condition ourselves. But this “we” is (mostly) not conscious. It can however be made (more) conscious. One can become conscious of the conditioning that one does (to) oneself. Another matter is if this can then be changed, if it one wants to change it – there is a reason why we condition ourselves the way we do, a historical reason: our “past” is in our preferences and prejudices – it can certainly be strengthened, purified, concentrated. In this way the secondary conditionings, the “demands” of the outside world, can be reduced in their influence on our decision making. The limit to what can be “softened” as an influence-demand is of course basic physical requirements. For the rest, the world is extremely malleable if ones core of conditioning is accessed by the mind and fired up by conscious intention, it then “inspires” change in behavior, effect, affect, rips through causal paradigms/matrices and sows the possibilities of new ones.
The key to this is to consider unconscious conditioning, what is normally know as “what I am” or “what I happen to be”, as “what I do”. There is an illusory border between consciousness (behavior that symbolizes itself to itself) and non-conscious behavior. Both are acting, doing, performing. Once we become self-aware, this acting becomes problematic. This problematic-ness and the attempts at its resolution is what has so far been called philosophy. The problem is sovled if we become fully dedicated to “be our past”. Philosophies have hinted at this necessity (or even made it very explicit) but no means have been presented, at least not rational means. What can we do to “become our past” to stand fully in the present? What is the core of all our past conditioning? There must be some “mundane” activity, recognizable in our daily goings-about, which roots directly into this deepest activity of our historical being.
I’ve only read the OP, but I think the point is that the past and future are inferred, and not directly experienced in the present - that reviewing the past and planning the future can easily degrade and turn into minor obsessions which prove to be massive energy sinks, inhibiting our ability to live intelligently and fully in the present moment.
There is no living intelligently in the present moment, to live entirely in the moment with no past to make sense of what is going on around you, is to be retarted.
We could experience motion directly, but than again when do you experience this motion directly? And if past isn’t fully past, then either it is not past or it is mixed with something else when past is only partially past. If there is something else that makes up past, then what is this other stuff that makes up past? And we do have experience of this phenomena when we look at projection real or a flip book. Experience is consistent with both options, and some people say they experience things in a freeze frame type of motion, so there is no “flow” for them.
Now suppose that we do experience motion directly, then would not motion directly show up in our memory? Yet my memory shows me there was a before and after, and I would experience this directly in motion if it shows up in memory. Memory shows that it is broken up. Now maybe we do experience motion directly and it is not exactly copied in memory. Now how can we say we experience motion directly if we are going to admit that memory is not exactly the same. Have we compared the motion it was suppose to represent with the actual thing, and found that there is a difference between the two (i.e. motion that we directly experience and this partial memory of that motion we directly experienced? Looks like we would tell the difference in between them because their not one and the same.
No one said anything against things changing, but yet you are saying that you have something indicating another thing. How does something indicate anything outside of itself on its own? If I have disparate points on a graph and no lines to connect them to one another as they are, then they only indicate one another if they are connected in some way. And surely you would agree that one place is identical to another place? Now you would have to carry on, when they flow, that it goes from one place to another, and yet each step is contradictory from the other. Now one would have to connect these things up, but it is not apparent in these things, because their contradictory list can be long, since they are supposedly changing from what they were to what they aren’t, and there is still change and flow. I perceive things at the time I perceive them, and to say they go outside of themselves doesn’t seem to make sense. I can imagine it is so, but it is not given in the experience itself when I have it.
Interesting, spaceTIME can’t be described in present, past, or future. And yet what would spaceTIME be when time is not involved? Just space. And where is the immediate adjacency with space? What is it adjacent to?