how could it be an actual world? Wouldn't that be equivalent to saying that it 'is' the case rather than it is possibly the case? (No doubt what is actual is possible, but what is possible is not necessarily actual - so possible can't mean actual).

So I think it must mean 'imaginary'. But then the claim is that this is the best world imaginable.

However, most people think they can imagine somewhere better.

Perhaps, however, if they truly understood the nature of the world they are living in, they would realize that they could not imagine a better place.

But then that just amounts to saying that you can't imagine anywhere better once you understand that this world is the best.

But in that case we could just say that this world is maximally good or something. The addition of 'best of all possible worlds' seems to add nothing.

One where things could have happened differently. — Wallows

So it is an actual world? Or just an imaginary one?

Thanks Bertrand Russell.

It is true you can't eat shit. In an other world, shit would taste good, and it would be nutritious. — god must be atheist

Not if you deserve to eat nasty tasting shit. Then a world in which shit tasted good and was nutritious would be a world in which you do not get what you deserve, and thus it would be sub optimal.

It is conceivable that everything that happens is for the best. For what that would take is for this world to be as Reason wants it to be. And given that Reason is omnipotent, it is reasonable to suppose that this world 'is' exactly as Reason wants it to be. And thus reasonable to suppose that everything that happens in it, is ultimately for the best.

What's a 'possible world'? I have no clear idea.

I think this is the best world. But I am not sure what 'possible' adds.

It is not the 'one making the claim' who has the burden of proof (that is something those with no expertise but big mouths say on youtube videos).

Consider: 'the one making the claim has the burden of proof' is a claim. So now you have to discharge the burden of proof. And no matter how you do it, you will have to make some more claims. And on and on it will go, without end. Thus, if 'the one making the claim has the burden of proof' is true, then nothing can be proved, including that claim.

The lesson: stop pronouncing confidently on matters you know nothing about.

To deny or negate a proposition that's a necessary truth will lead to a contradiction in all possible worlds. — TheMadFool

I do not know what that means. To be clear, I accept that it is true that a true proposition is not also false (the law of non-contradiction). But I do not think that it is 'necessarily' true that a true proposition is not also false. Or at least, I do not yet know what 'necessarily' true means beyond just 'true'.

Talk of possible worlds is really no help here at all, for the notion of 'possible' is precisely what's at issue.

Talk of possible worlds is just a colourful way of saying 'metaphysically possible'.

For example, say I want to know what 'cheese' is, and you say 'cheese is fromage'. Well, ok, but I'm non the wiser for all you've done is given me another word to refer to the same thing.

It seems to me that this, at best, is what talk of 'possible worlds' does, if that.

I mean, what is a possible world? An actual place? Or just an imaginary one?

Isn't that exactly what a "world without you in it" means? You either just lack imagination or you're being disingenuous — khaled

No, that isn't what it means at all. Again: I can imagine my body not existing, but I seem unable to imagine that 'I' - the one doing the imagining - does not exist.
Yet I do not exist of necessity.
So inconceivability is neither constitutive of, or a reliable guide to necessity's presence.

When people make a mistake in arithmetic they are forgetting a definition or a rule somewhere. — khaled

Give any explanation you like, the simple fact is they often imagine that 18 x 3 = 58. It's why maths exists as a discipline. And it is why rules are formulated - for relying on our imagination is not a reliable way of doing anything other than the most basic of sums.

But even if everything I have just said is wrong - and it really isn't - it is absurd to think that your imagination either constitutively determines what is or is not possible (that somehow your imagination is in charge of reality), or that reality somehow has control over your imagination such that it has managed to forbid it from imagining that which reality cannot provide. The idea is simply farcical.

So, again, conceivability and necessity are not the same notion (nor is one a reliable guide to the other).

literally just answered this. Yes. Though I don't think there is much point in moving on when we disagree on something as basic as "can you imagine 3x18 equalling 58" — khaled

No, because you keep pressing the conceivability point, thus leaving me unclear what view you hold.
'Inconceivably false' and 'true by definition' are not the same. So you go on about conceivability, and then - out of nowhere - you claim that a necessary truth is 'true by definition'. Hence my confusion.

Anyway, you now think that what it is for a proposition to be 'necessarily' true (as opposed to just 'true') is that it is 'true by definition'.

Well, I don't think that captures the notion of necessity, for no word has its definition of necessity. I mean, you'd agree to that, presumably?

Bachelor 'does' mean 'unmarried man'. But it doesn't 'have' to mean that. It just does, yes?

That's true of all words. So if 'necessarily true' just means 'true by definition' then 'necessarily true' doesn't tell us anything more about the nature of reality than just 'true' would.

I am arguing we cannot imagine 3x18 being 58 and that I CAN easily imagine a world in which I don't exist. You claimed the opposite in both cases. — khaled

Well, I just think both claims are false. People would not make mistakes in mental arithmetic if they were incapable of imagining the sum equally something it did not, in fact equal.

And I cannot imagine a world without me in it. All I can do is imagine my body not existing.

Anyway, it does seem from the above that you are now identifying 'necessarily true' with 'true by definition'. Is that right?

Can be interpreted to mean whatever is conceivable is metaphysically possible not that they are one and the same. — khaled

Yes, but we were talking about what metaphysically possibility might be, and you offered that. So now you're just being disingenuous.

How about the rest of my post? You know, where the bulk of the arguments against you lie. — khaled

I didn't detect any.

Are you saying that what it means to say that a proposition is necessarily true is that it is true 'by definition'?

What do you mean by 'contingently' true?

Sure, if you define the temporal property of "now" or "the present moment" as being simultaneous with our conscious experiences — Luke

No, I am just saying what the present moment is made of - that is, I am saying what the property of presentness is.

There's what is present, and there's what presentness is. You're running these together.

I would note that others have defined the present moment differently, as the moment consciousness is present minus the brain processing time of approximately 300-500ms. — Luke

No, that wasn't a definition of the present moment. The person who wrote it was just saying what I'd already said, namely that if time is a kind of soup, then what we experience as the present moment has in fact already passed.

The present moment is just the present moment - it is what a moment is if it is not past or future. To say of a moment that it is 'present' is to say something about its temporal properties.

Your use of "consciousness is present" appears to conflate 'consciousness is present in me' and 'consciousness is at the present moment'. — Luke

No, that's a conflation you are making, not me. I have been clear. There is a present moment. The experiences you are having right now are in it.

The point, however, is that what they are experiences 'of' will be past events if - if - that is, time is a kind of stuff.

I don't think it is a kind of stuff. I think things are largely as they appear. These events - these ones - appear to be happening right now. I think they probably are happening right now, not a fraction of a second ago.

This seems like a contradiction. Are you making a distinction between Reason and reasoning? What is it? — Luke

How does it seem like a contradiction? There isn't even a whiff of contradiction about it.

'Our reason' is a faculty. Using it is called 'reasoning'. And what it gives us insight into is Reason.

For an analogy: sight, seeing, and sights. Sight is a faculty. Seeing is what you're doing when you're using it. And sights are what you see with it.

Our reason is a faculty; reasoning is what you're doing when you use it; and Reason is what you gain insight into by using it.

Time, I am saying, is made of Reason's attitudes.

How would that show it to fall apart? My view is that what's true is true, and that 'contingently' true and 'necessarily' true denote nothing extra. So whether 2 + 1 = 3 or whether it = 4, the point is that adding 'necessarily' adds nothing.

I think we're both saying something similar or the same: you say the present moment is the time of reasoning, whereas I say it is the time of consciousness. — Luke

I wouldn't define it like that, as those definitions are circular (given that to say that 'it is the time of consciousness' is equivalent to saying it "it is the moment consciousness is present" ).

My view is that 'time' is not a stuff - not a dimension, not a goo that events are suspended in. Time is a set of attitudes that Reason adopts towards events. It has nothing to do with us reasoning.

er, no. You've nothing to say.

That too was a joke, yes? I think I am getting the hang of it. Dissecting a joke takes something that might - or might not - have had some potential life in it, and prevents it from developing. Like the morning after pill. Does that work?

Anyway, let's say that your joke causes mirth in me. Then the joke is funny - funny-to-me. It has the property of being 'funny-to-me'. It won't necessarily have that property if it is funny to someone else, or funny to you. It only has that property if it produces mirth in me.

What I propose is that the property of being 'present' is akin to this kind of a property. An event is 'present' when it features as the object of Reason's temporal attitudes, just as a joke is funny-to-me when it features as the object of my mirth.

It is still producing no mirth in me.

How?

For example, is this a joke?

"I don't know about you guys, but I live in a square-circular house. I can look at it in a mirror anytime I want"

Presumably not, because the first claim is just incoherent and the second doesn't do anything to reveal - to our delight or frustration - a confused sense in which the first may, after all, be true.

But that, it seems to me, is how things are with what you said too.

So I really do not understand.

Question begging. If reality is as you think it is - and I take it that you think time is some kind of a stuff - then your experience of the live feed lags behind its actual report.

It would have to be instant; no perceiving; no figuring out; no processing at all. — PoeticUniverse

But it can't involve 'no perceiving' (that's a contradiction). For the question is 'what it would take' for us to be perceiving the present moment.

If time is a dimension in which events are located, then it is hard to see how the events constitutive of our experiences could do anything but lag behind the events they are telling us about. Hence perceiving the present moment becomes like catching one's shadow.

But there's a different way to think about time, one which makes possible (though not inevitable) that our apparent perceptions of the present moment are indeed what they seem to be.

No, YOU pay attention. You have claimed, apropos nothing, that if one denies that truths of definition are necessary truths

we find ourselves claiming that falsehoods are necessary truths. — creativesoul

Oh really? Explain.

The present moment is 'now' - the problem, as I see it, is that if time is an objective material, then the experiences you have in the present moment give you information about events that occurred in the past, at the same time as representing them to be occurring now. Hence why on such a view we seem unable to experience the present moment. We get the impression we are experiencing the present moment, but in fact the content of such experiences are past moments, albeit represented to be present. Hence we are subject to a systematic illusion of presentness.

The way to overcome this and respect appearances is to reject the 'objective soup' view of time. What I suggest replacing it with is an 'external attitude' view of time. According to my replacement, 'what it is' for an event to be in the present is for that event to be being thought about in a certain kind of way, albeit not by us but by some third party - by Reason.

You ought to consider that if everything is in the past, as you describe in the op — Metaphysician Undercover

That's not my view. That's what a 'time as soup' view would imply. But as I said in the OP, I think it's baloney precisely because it has that upshot.

So what we need to think about is what it would take for a person to be accurately perceiving the present moment.

You ought to consider that if everything is in the past, as you describe in the op, then things we are aware of are only memories. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think that follows. Memories are recollections, but what I am talking about are our impressions of the present moment. I am wondering what it would take for them to be accurate.

Awareness of the present is not an illusion, it's the apprehension of a real difference between future and past. — Metaphysician Undercover

I do not follow. Given that my current impressions represent their content to be 'present', they'd need actually to be present for those impressions to qualify as veridical. So there would need to be no lag between the content of the impression obtaining, and the impression forming in my mind.

I've lost you now. Again, what would it take for us to be accurately perceiving the present moment?

Separating the two is perhaps not the best way to think of things on a phenomenological level, — Umbra

it is by separating the two that one sees that we are subject to an illusion of the presentness of things, given a certain view about the nature of time.

Simply because the things of our present experience may contain the "property of pastness" does not mean that we are under the sway of an illusion. — Umbra

How could it not do, given that our experience does not represent them to have that property, but a quite different one - presentness?

Again, I know that the light from the stars I am seeing is the result of an event that occurred long ago. — Umbra

When I look at the Mueller Lyer lines - the two parallel straight lines that appear, visually, to be bending - I know that the two lines are straight and not bending. But they nevertheless 'appear' to be bending, and thus I am subject to an illusion. An illusion, to be an illusion, does not have to convince its victim that what is being represented to be the case, is in fact the case. It is sufficient that some aspect of what is being represented to be the case, is not the case.

Likewise, though I may believe correctly that the stars I am seeing are in fact in the past, my experience of them represents them to be in the present. No-one, for instance, who has not been told about the stars and the length of time it takes their light to travel to us, would believe they are looking at past stars. They would believe that the stars are as present as everything else in their experience - because that is what their experience represents to be the case.

So I do not really see what your star example is supposed to illustrate, for it seems if anything just to describe a supposed illusion - that stars that appear to be in the present, are in fact in the past.

I am not following you. Presentism is, as I understand it (and I am not at all sure I do), the view that only those things that have presentness actually exist. So it is not really a view about time, as such, but a view about existence.

Anyway, can you explain how the view that only present things exist would show that our perceptions of the present are accurate and not systematically mistaken?

No idea what you're on about - what explanation? What are you even trying to explain?

True by definitional fiat. — creativesoul

Er, yes. I am saying they don't exist and we don't need them to exist.

I don't see how the view I have expressed is 'presentism'. I am not making a claim about what exists (which is what I understand presentism to be), but about what we're aware of.

My view is that it is absurd to think that we are not aware of the present moment.

There are views about hte nature of time - the idea that time is some kind of mind-external substance - that imply we are not aware of the present moment, but are subject to the systematic illusion of presentness.

I am saying that those views need to be rejected, if that is indeed what they imply.

What we need to think about is how it would be possible to be aware of the present moment, for then we would be wondering about how things would need to be if things are to be as they appear to be.

When did I say that? — khaled

Here:

A contingent truth means that even when you are convinced it is true right now you can imagine a situation where it isn't — khaled

Who? And how would that answer go?

I mean this:

The real question is; what happens when we experience mind itself, turning observer and observed into the same object? — Tzeentch

just sounds like Krishnamurti nonsense. It is a) not, by any stretch of the imagination, the 'real' question; and b) answer the second bit yourself by looking into a mirror and staring at your own eyes.

But it does not follow that my experience of the present moment is therefore illusory. — Umbra

I fail to see why not. My experience represents its objects to be present. So, for it to be accurate they would need actually to be present. Yet on the time-as-soup view, what my experience represents to be the case is not the case. The objects of my experience (that is, not the experience itself, but what it represents to be the case) have in reality a quite different property - pastness - to the presentness that I perceive them to have.

How are such experiences not, therefore, illusory?

I think it is you - not I - who has changed the premise. You're simply pointing out that the experience itself is now. Yes, but I am not talking about the experience itself, but its representative contents.

take some other illusion - any illusion you like. Well, the experience constitutive of the illusion is not illusory in the sense that I 'am' having an experience. But it is its 'contents' that qualify it as an illusion - for what they represent to be the case is not accurate. In my dreams I take my imaginings to not be imagininings, and hence I seem to be inhabiting a mind-external world on such occasions. But the impression is illusory, for what my experiences represent to be mind-external are mind-internal.

That's exactly what is the case here. The content of some of my mental states are represented to have presentness, whereas in fact they do not.

To put it another way, this experience right now does not seem to be of the past, but of the present. If it is actually of the past, then it is illusory. We do not appear to be experiencing the past, but the present.

No, the real question is 'what would it take for us to have a veridical experience of the present?'

Try and answer that question.

Of course, we only experience what's already past. — PoeticUniverse

No, not 'of course'. The opposite: of course we experience the present, not an illusion of the present.

Make the adjustments necessary.

And 'of course' we have free will.

Make the adjustments necessary.

And so on.

A fool overturns the more clear in favour of respecting the less. Be wise!

I think you're all thinking about matters in quite the wrong way.

It is a basic principle of investigation, first articulated by Aristotle, that you 'respect the appearances'.

If something appears to be the case, that is prima facie evidence that it 'is' the case.

The objects of sense experiences appear to have now-ness.

So, that is prima facie evidence that they do have now-ness.

What you're all doing is starting out with a certain idea about how things are - an idea whose truth should not be taken for granted - and then blithely concluding that as that idea would force us to conclude that all our impressions of the present are illusory, they 'are' illusory.

That's the opposite of what you should do if you're serious about understanding reality. For what you've done is effectively decide who's guilty 'before' investigating the crime scene. You should not assume who's guilty before investigating the scene - you should just investigate the scene and let the evidence lead you.

What you are doing is using philosophy to support whatever worldview you happen to have in your head at the moment. That's not what you should use philosophy to do. That's to try and make Reason your slave.

Now, the events that you are experiencing right now appear to be 'right now' - that is, they have presentness. They appear to be now, so other things being equal that is good evidence that they 'are' now. It is therefore prima facie evidence that the 'soup' conception of time is false.

Perhaps changing the question would be better. What would it take - so, forget what you think is in fact the case - what would it take for our perceptions of the present moment to be veridical? How would things need to be, for my impression that this is happening 'now' to be correct?

I don't think anyone can imagine it being 58. We can believe it is 58 momentarily but that doesn't make it true. Once someone has discovered it is 54 he can't imagine a situation in which it is 58. A contingent truth means that even when you are convinced it is true right now you can imagine a situation where it isn't — khaled

This is just clearly false. We can easily imagine sums equalling numbers distinct from those they actually equal - that's what's happening when people get sums wrong. And when we're unsure - as we often are - what a sum equals, we can imagine it equalling 54 or 55 or whatever.

A contingent truth means that even when you are convinced it is true right now you can imagine a situation where it isn't — khaled

Again, clearly false. That's just not what philosophers use the term to mean. Take your own existence. Can you imagine not existing? No. Yet the fact you exist would be described by virtually all philosophers as a contingent truth, not a necessary one (yet by your definition above, it would be a necessary truth).

There is a big debate about the connection between conceivability and metaphysical possibility, with some arguing that if you can conceive of something being the case, then it is metaphysically possible for it to be the case, and others disputing this. The very existence of this debate shows that metaphysical possibility is not considered to be one and the same as conceivability. I mean, even those who think that conceivability is a reliable guide to metaphysical possibility do not think the two are one and the same notion.

As tim wood has said, you are stumbling along in this post and there's nothing but your own feet to blame. — Umbra

That makes no sense at all.

There is no "illusion" of the present in the way you are framing it. This is not to say we don't "lag behind" our experiences; — Umbra

Nor does that. If - if - our experiences lag behind the reality they are giving us an experience of, then we are subject to an illusion of the present, for what our experience represents to be present is actually past.

Because you exclude any insights due to physics, I have to assume you're asking about the phenomenology of perception, yes? As to the possibility of illusion, by what standard? — tim wood

I am asking about what I am asking about - read the OP.

Another thread stumbling over its lack of any definitions, — tim wood

Another person who thinks philosophy is about defining things. Get a dictionary and solve all the problems of philosophy!

It's your thread, what do you mean by past? — tim wood

An attitude of Reason.

It seems like the question of the OP might lead to a discussion of some interest, but you appear to have tied a knot in it. — tim wood

Er, what?

we live in a perceptual present, but in terms of the world, it's always already passed. — tim wood

No. That's the result of a particular picture of time - time as soup. As explained in the OP.

But if - if - an analysis of time has the upshot that all of our impressions of 'now' constitute illusions, then that analysis is rubbish.

First order of business is to respect appearances.

A good analysis of time is not one that renders our experience of the present systematically illusory, but one that vindicates it. Certainly, if other things are equal then an analysis of time that respects the appearances - and thus permits us an awareness of the present moment - is rationally to be preferred to one that does not.

Good! thanks for wasting my time you giant Philip K.