Hi everyone,
A question lingers long all today in my mind. What is the present? It cannot be a range of times when something we can influence can happen, since we can only influence what is to come - what has been has been, and we only influence what is to come as per the index of time with our actions, which again take place in the present, as it were, so therelies the question. What Is The Present? Why should it be? Why not just the past and the future?
So is “the present” just a linguistic trapping, a mere linguistic problem of the philosophies of time?
The nature of the present:
The present could be the sum total of all the events that have taken place in the past. But what is the past again but an array of events which have occured for the time which has dealt with processes which have happened. The previous sentence is not free from its temporal sense which is another reason for me to believe that the present is just a trapping of language. So whether we say that we are ‘doing’ something, or perhaps ‘walking’ in the park, or ‘drinking’ a glass of water, its perhaps the culmination of past events being represented, for within a past which one has taken part in, there are several discernable events which are perhaps independent of each other - for instance, all things provided for, you may want to finish your dinner before a walk. Or you may want to walk to tire yourself out before the dinner and a nap.
So these seemingly independent events which you can perform at your whims are what decide that one of these can follow or precede the other. There are as many unambiguous examples but there are vague and ambiguous ones as well. The present seems to be that within which the manipulatable span of all actions and processes pass to entail itself to the present and add inertia to form the future that is possible from the sum total of these and other ‘older’ processes or rather the conditions brought by the occurence or quasi-culmination of some process in a form of temporary result.
In my entire post so far the use of time related terms has become unavoidable, though I started out to define the present without considering time to be a particular way. By just posting it I have either understood the trappings of human language or rather English language to be more specific, or have obviated the need to understand the present as separate from time and temporal things.
The trappings of language:
And I think language, and especially stereotype is a particular cause of misunderstanding amongst philosophers, tyros and veterans like us all and really good and great ones like many others before and amongst us…But one thing is for sure that as long as humanity does not devise an ‘unequivocal’ and unambiguous language, there will be these problems and others.
The seperate present:
Does the present ‘exist’ or rather is it a definitive reality? Is it possible to not consider the present for all our logical discussions? Is it possible for us living in this ‘present’ to be able to affect whatever processes and parameters of these processes in real time? Would we rather take the present as a subset of the past as we can’t undo what we are doing at this infinitesimally small instant?
The above set of questions may make everything we do seem arbitrary, but it must be remembered that we think in terms of the future and not the present, which is something everybody forgets. Whether long or short term, people havesomething in mind and go by what they believe they shd be doing to achieve the same. So this is a method/manner of engineering the furture- as we have no control over the present infinitesimally small process, and that means that all our processes have to be diverted to function in the future, which must simply be the converging point of all our present processes’ directions.
So do we need the present? Or would we rather think in terms of (and engineer) the future by our actions, processes anbd through our influence on events?