This is like saying you cannot talk to someone on the phone because there is a time lag between the caller and the receiver.

You mean the mind cannot experience the present.

There is a lag between sensation and the experience of it, which puts all things sensed into the past, but we must allow that the things which come to pass are coming from the future. We can conclude that things coming from the future have a type of existence which makes it impossible for them to be sensed. Whether the cognitive mind functions in the past, future, present, or a combination of these, is another question.

The mind cannot experience reality (what is) — Dennis Balson

You recognize you have a definition problem, yes? For starters, mind, experience, reality, what is. Play with these and you can prove what you want. But maybe it's not that simple.

For example: how do account for a baseball batter being able to hit a baseball?

All activities follow a preset pattern. It's what we refer to as the 'characteristic' or 'nature' of something. Because of this, I don't believe in chaos or randomness. Anyway, that's beside the point, imagine two boxers fighting in a ring. They see where each other's heads are and they try to figure out how best to project their punches so as to hit the other. They do this with the knowledge that the other guy will attempt to change the position of their head to avoid getting hit. However, the mind takes as many factors as it can into consideration and predicts the best move. That prediction of the future is one of the more common and advanced activities of the mind. We may perceive the past but we use our knowledge of the 'nature/character' of things to conceive of the possible future circumstance thus upsetting the minimal delay caused by the process of perception. Also, considering the many reference points we use to define a circumstance, it is more probable we perceive reality (in the sense of a particular relationship) than not.

We can only experience the present as a memory, it's impossible to experience it as it occurs.

The present consists of an instant which is changed for another instant immediately the present instant ceases to exist.

Really, everything only appears to be happening.

it's impossible to experience it as it occurs. — TWI

What is your understanding of "as it occurs"?

I think that few, if any, who claim to know what is, claim that we know it exhaustively. We all realize that there is a delay between the emission of information and its reception. If you read the Medieval Scholastic accounts of sensation, you will see extended discussions of the "sensible species" which was their term for the carrier of sensible information. At the say tine, they did not blush at saying that we know what is.

Part of this was certainly based on the experience of persistence and the dynamic continuity of physical reality. But, I think, another part if it, clearly seen in Aristotelian philosophy going back to the Categories, is a far more expansive view of being that you seem to be taking. Action has always been seen by Aristotelians as inhering in the being that acts. Thus, the Aristotelian tradition sees beings not only as the core object thought of by materialists, but also as that object's radiance of action.

Aristotle was perceptive enough to see that in sensation as well as in cognitive perception, subject and object are linked by an indivisible identity. The object being sensed by me is identically me sensing the object. The object being known by me is identically me knowing the object. As he discusses at length in De Anima, both sensation and perceptual cognition involve the joint actualization of two potentials in a single act (or event). The act of sensing simultaneously actualizes both the object's sensibility and the subject's power to sense. The act of perceptual cognition simultaneously actualizes both the object's intelligibility and the subject's capacity to be informed.

We can see this in the neuroscience of perception. My neural representation of a being is identically the the being's modification of my neural state. For example, the light scattered by an object (its sensible species) modifies the state of rods and cone and cones in my retina. That modified state is identically mine visual image and the object's modification of my retinal state. This dual citizenship continues in effect as the neural signal propagates to the various centers of visual processing in my brain. The information is both mine and the object's continuing action within me. It is literally an existential penetration of me by the being I am perceiving.

So, the projection of being I'm aware of is identically the being's concurrent dynamical projection with in (its existential penetration of) me. Of course, the present information, existing concurrent within me, has a past origin, but that is hardly surprising to any student of nature. Whatever is now bears the imprint of a history going back to the big bang.

Time is a genuine continuum; it does not consist of discrete "instants," any more than space consists of discrete "points." We can arbitrarily designate an instant (or a point) for some purpose, thereby creating a discontinuity; but we cannot experience any such thing, because each infinitesimal moment blends indistinguishably into its immediate predecessor and successor.

Yes, time reflects the continuity of the change it measures.

it's impossible to experience it as it occurs. — TWI

But don't we experience it as it occurs within us?

My understanding is that it doesn't occur at all in reality, it just appears to occur.

I believe we only observe what appears to be an occurance, like watching a film/movie, nothing is occurring, it's just a still shot observed for a fraction of a second then a shutter comes down until the next frame is positioned. No movement or occurance, just a convincing illusion really, the difference being we know it's an illusion because we understand the mechanism operating behind us.

Why would you believe that? It seems to me that if we are informed, there must be something adequate to informing us at work.

An instant in so called time must be just that, not something that lasts for a period of time but something that starts and ends at the same instant, in other words it has no length or substance so it cannot ultimately exist, it just appears to exist.

I believe the same as we all believe, we don't know, we can only guess, Einstein said something like "atheism is no belief at all" but I disagree, it is a belief in the non existence of God.

But,we do know! "Knowing" names a human activity. To say we do not know is an abuse of language. It is effectively saying that we do not do what we do.

Of course, we can discuss what kind of activity "knowing" names, but that is an empirical question, and one that we cannot engage in unless we know relevant evidence.

The objective world we seem to occupy could all be an illusion or dream, we don't know, if that is true we cannot prove or disprove it as any measures taken, any science involved, will be part of that illusion.

A few years ago I decided that in my next dream I would use logic to decide if I was in fact dreaming and awaken, sure enough I soon had a strange dream in which I was steering a narrowboat along a canal at an impossible dream, I rembered my previous decision to use logic to analyze things. But the problem was I had no knowledge of the laws of physics in the real world, if I did I would realise my dream world was separate, instead I looked around me and everything was in perfect detail, the weeds bending in the boats wash, totally convincing so I decided it was real, and carried on dreaming!

I saw a documentary on ww2 dogfights. A fighter pilot has to make a guesstimate (is that the right word?) about where the enemy plane in front of him will be and fire with adjustments made. In modern planes there are onboard computers to assist the pilot.

The point is that as the speed of events increase our mental reaction time becomes more and more significant.

In short the OP is right. We can only experience the past. This should be no surprise because I've heard it many times on the forum that when we look at the stars we're seeing history and not the present. Even the sunrise is 8 minutes old.


The philosophical implications of this I don't get.

Assuming of course that the stars and the Sun are in fact what and where they are, we have no first hand experience, just what we are told, and the tellers could be misinterpreting what they are observing as all initial observations in the past were.

Are you saying the speed of light is infinite?

The objective world we seem to occupy could all be an illusion or dream, we don't know, — TWI

We do know. I know what dreams are. They span but a short time. What is an illusion except something that is not real, but what we mean by "real" is the world we know via experience. So to say reality is not real is a further abuse of language.

To think reality is an illusion is to say it is not reality -- again a contradiction in terms. Still, we know that whatever informs our experience has the power to so inform it -- because nothing can do what it cannot do.

So, what is it that we don't know? We don't know what reality can do beyond informing us as it does. So, we form hypotheses. Descartes entertained the hypothesis that it could also act as an evil spirit -- a demon. Others suggest we are a brain in a vat or a simulation. All such hypotheses are unfalsifiable, and so unscientific. Science offers falsifiable hypotheses such as general relativity and quantum field theory.

So, I admit that we do not know the deep structure of material reality, but we have a methodology that prefers falsifiable to unfalsifiable hypotheses and we have made a great deal of progress by applying that methodology.

What you are talking about is not knowing the present. It is making predictions about the future.

We only know what dreams are when we they are viewed from the vantage point of wakefulness.

When trying to observe the quantum world nothing makes logical sense, we are faced with a conundrum, the logical observable world is built on an illogical observation, we know nothing if all our observations are based on nothing logical.

We only know what dreams are when we they are viewed from the vantage point of wakefulness. — TWI

Not quite. I, for example, am a lucid dreamer. I know when I am dreaming, and if I do not like how a dream is going, I wake myself up. So, when we are talking about dreams in the context of skepticism, we are not talking about actual dreams, but something that is not a dream at all. So, what is it? It seems to me it is undefined -- hiding behind an equivocal use of "dream," but actually not a dream at all. If it is something we cannot wake from, if it constrains our existence and choices, if it forms the very fabric of the lived world, then how, precisely, does it differ from reality? If there is no discernible, experiential, difference between A and B, then what does it mean to say A is not B -- that this so-called "dream" is not reality? It seems to me that such claims are utterly meaningless.

I think the "illogic" of the quantum world is baggage brought the seers of paradox, not presented to us by reality.

I've only succeeded once to realise that I'm dreaming, very subjective experience for everyone.

As for quantum theory I think it's largely bunkum with lots of buzz words.

My real question is:

If it constrains our existence and choices, if it forms the very fabric of the lived world, then how, precisely, does it differ from reality? If there is no discernible, experiential, difference between A and B, then what does it mean to say A is not B -- that this so-called "dream" is not reality? — Dfpolis

I don't know what is real, some of my experiences seem to suggest there is another reality behind this reality, so what is ultimate reality? As a human being with limited abilities I can't say, only speculate.

That's called leading the target and any hunter has to do it. Quarterbacks have to do it when they throw a football. Nothing to do with past and present.

In short the OP is right. We can only experience the past. — TheMadFool

Not quite. Not, we only experience the past; rather, what we experience has passed. I guess the point is, that it all depends on how you define things. Given that the speed of light is finite, then everything is passed by the time you get it. But that level of discrimination just isn't useful - and is thereby inaccurate - for most things.

I think that the problem stems from faulty conceptualization. We do not experience things as discrete things, but as events. Events have duration, characteristics, and a flow of probabilistic indeterminacy throughout its transformations which constitute its potentiality, combined with the tracking of actual manifest changes in reality which constitute its actuality. So that "perceive the present" is not as meaningful as the speed of perception, allowing for a greater more detailed capture of the transformations of events. So that we perceive events at a certain size, speed, wavelength, but time is more relative to these relational factors themselves, rather than "past, present, future".

Yes, given a reaction time of, say, 1 millisecond, we live in a world where meaningful events take longer than that. Thus, making experience instantaneous.

Science, however, studies events that take place in less than our reaction times and so we need instruments. Flies are a blur in our visual fields.