That's fair. a "thick" present feels in line with my feelings about this theme. I wonder though, if the present reaches a sufficient 'thickness' is 'presentism' still a good name? — csalisbury

It isn't a bad name, it seems to me, if the idea that only the present exists from the perspective of an agent can be given a reasonable sense.

The sense in which the future doesn't yet exist is the sense in which future possibilities still are open from the present perspective of a powerful agent. It amounts to a negation of nomological determinism -- i.e. the idea that the historical past in conjunction with the laws of nature determines the future -- which is a premise that doesn't make sense from the standpoint of practical reasoning.

There also is a related sense in which the past doesn't exist. From the perspective of an agent, many opportunities pass by and the possibility of them being exploited become foreclosed. The past doesn't exist anymore in the sense that it has become settled history, forever beyond the reach of the powers of an agent to shape some of its aspects according to her will (though the past still 'exists' from her perspective in a different sense: as furnishing constraints on her present and future actions).

The present, then, exists in the sense that it consists in all the opportunities for one to engage one's agential powers in various ways: power/opportunity pairs which constitute possibilities that threaten to become foreclosed, but that are immediately relevant to practical deliberation. Since actualizing one's powers to exploit present opportunities (either through individual or collective action) is a process that typically takes time, and is thus described with the use of the progressive aspect of action verbs, this also accounts for the thickness of the present.

I think the issues between these views arise from a misunderstanding of how tense operates in natural languages. The eternalist makes tensed claims, intending them to be tenseless, and so speaks nonsense – the presentist takes the ordinary mechanics of tense to have bizarre metaphysical consequences that they don't.

Idk, a lot of philosophy is just really shitty linguistics.

What I claim is that presentism is wrong because it makes you delete memories or mental processes occurred in the past. Presentism is about ontology of time. If presentism were right, then memories about the past would be deleted with the events and the times of the past. So, presentism is in trouble. — quine

Why would memories be necessarily deleted? They are part of your present, just like anticipations of the future are part of your present.