Thinking about the temporal experience of listening to music, or of reading a novel, can be misleading, though, if we think of the perceptual process as something that takes place wholly during the very short duration of a "present moment" and if we think of this momentary "present moment" of experience as being merely externally constrained by the past through the exercise of short term memory and by the imaginative anticipation of a future experience that has not yet occurred. — Pierre-Normand
Are you familiar with the concept of the ‘specious present’, which I think was coined by William James? The idea, presented famously by Husserl, is that the present moment is a tripartite structure that consists of retention , primal presentation and protention (anticipation). Retention and protention don’t occupy separate temporal positions relative to the ‘now’, they all belong simultaneously to it. — Joshs
its thickness is context dependent and hence relative to whatever wider context of experience gives meaning to the very many moments of shorter duration that make up this experience or activity. — Pierre-Normand
In order to spell it out more fully and make it more plausible, it will prove useful to mention the main source of the intuition that the objective flow of time can be understood as the movement of an instantaneous present moment that represents a moving cutting edge between the growing past and the shrinking future. — Pierre-Normand
I look forward to it! From what I've read it is more the concern of presentism's critics who question the length of the present moment. — Luke
What I want to argue is that the present moment is real because it is perspectival and thick in a way that is loosely similar to the way in which, say, paper money has real value because, through our social practices, we invest it with value. — Pierre-Normand
Nice quote. Present needs indeed a context. I would put though a stop at the place of the first comma. Because even context does not make the present "real". It can only provide a frame of reference, based on which we can enclose, define, limit it. And that has to be continuous. I can say, for example, that right now I'm writing a message, but I cannot locate any specific moment during this period by saying "Now!" or "This!"etc. Because until I have spelled or even thought of it, that moment would have already passed. Time is continuous and thus indivisible. Hence there cannot be a "real" present. In other words, there's no actually such a thing as a "present".There is no “real” present, any more than there is a “real” context: the entire symphony, its first movement, the movement’s 100th measure, are on equal standing, as are the presents associated with the performance of them.' —Yuval Dolev [1] — Pierre-Normand
Just a remark on "Whenever": We can talk about the "passage of time" from a lot of different aspects and for a lot of reasons, not only from or based on our present experience, as you say. But, OK, you are referring specifically to one of them.Whenever we ponder about the passage of time, we do it from the perspective of our present experience of it. — Pierre-Normand
Right. This is quite similar to what I described earlier.our involvement in them, either as observers or as actors, have a duration; they don't occur in an instant. — Pierre-Normand
Nice! I liked that! :smile:When temporally extended human experiences happen, such as listening to Beethoven's Pastoral symphony, what we experience in the moment is conditioned by what happened before and by our expectation of what is to come. — Pierre-Normand
OK, you have already brought in the element of context. This, and what I described earlier, apply to this question, too.consider a useful analogy to the question "What is the duration of now?" — Pierre-Normand
Right. Similar to what I have already described earlier.it makes no sense either to pinpoint the time of now to an instantaneous moment in time — Pierre-Normand
Nice! I liked that!the objective flow of time can be understood as the movement of an instantaneous present moment that represents a moving cutting edge between the growing past and the shrinking future. — Pierre-Normand
I'm not sure I follow. Non-presentists take the present moment to be unreal despite its perspectival (indexical) appearance. As someone with more presentist leanings, I consider our apparent aging and movement through time to be objective facts that are independent of our social practices. — Luke
When we take the present as "thick", it is inevitable that some part of "now" is future, and some part of "now" is past. I think this is what ↪Joshs refers to. If we describe this as tripartite there is two distinct ways of doing that. One would be to say that this part of past, along with this part of future, is a unity which we call now. In this case we need to determine the principle which unites into a "now", to determine how "thick" the now is. In this sense, the past and future are not actually separated from each other, as having a real difference from each other, because they are united in one "now". The other way is to assume that the unity is artificial, arbitrary, or not real, and that within the appearance of a thick "now", there is some real past, some real future, and a divisor, which is the true "now".
Which side of these two ways looks more plausible to you? Is there a real distinction between past and future, or not? — Metaphysician Undercover
Furthermore, the division between the (thick) present, the past and the future is perspectival and context dependent, but it is nevertheless real since it is causally effective — Pierre-Normand
What separates the present from the past? — frank
Nice quote. Present needs indeed a context. I would put though a stop at the place of the first comma. Because even context does not make the present "real". It can only provide a frame of reference, based on which we can enclose, define, limit it. And that has to be continuous. I can say, for example, that right now I'm writing a message, but I cannot locate any specific moment during this period by saying "Now!" or "This!"etc. Because until I have spelled or even thought of it, that moment would have already passed. Time is continuous and thus indivisible. Hence there cannot be a "real" present. In other words, there's no actually such a thing as a "present". — Alkis Piskas
We think of ourselves as living in time, having an autobiographical past, as well as a future, and present opportunities that we are liable to miss. This distinguishes us from non-rational animals who, although they also perceive and act on present opportunities (J.J. Gibson's affordances), don't self-consciously conceive of themselves as living in time. But what distinguishes us from them isn't merely our rich conception of time, but the impact this conception has on what we are and what we can do. In part, it enables us to live in (and build) a much thicker present, or so I would argue. — Pierre-Normand
I take it, then, that your interest here is not really to do with debates over the ontological nature of time itself, or perhaps even to do with the present moment, but is more about our (at least partially) socially-constructed lives within the "autobiographical present", which is enabled by our language and current knowledge about the world. — Luke
It doesn't follow from the fact that the application of A Series labels ('past', 'present' or 'future') to specific events or processes is essentially perspectival that this ordering isn't therefore objective. If I must get on a particular bus in order to get to work on time, it matters whether the bus has already passed at the stop where I usually take it (and I therefore missed it) or it is yet to pass (and hence I still have an opportunity to catch it). It matters as an objective fact of life since this event's being located in my past or in my future has a causal impact on my life. — Pierre-Normand
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