Is there such thing as the present?

[Just wondering]

Every second we live is one that’s passed, so is there such thing as the present? It’s supposed to be the present as I’m writing this and here it is, in the past. And even then the time it takes for information to get to the brain.

[Brett Nortj]

Yes, there is only the present. This is because there are only reactions, as things react things change, yes? There is memories of reactions, but no past. There is determinism, but no future, save that based on the state of matter at present, with the habitat we have, these changes will come about.

[swansont]

Physics doesn't use past, present, and future very much, as they are imprecise descriptions, and time depends on the reference frame you're in.

[iNow]

6 hours ago, Just wondering said:

Every second we live is one that’s passed, so is there such thing as the present? It’s supposed to be the present as I’m writing this and here it is, in the past. And even then the time it takes for information to get to the brain.

As swansont mentioned, it’s relative. By the time you become aware of the present, the time stamp represented by that moment has already passed.

It’s ephemeral, and gets even further complicated once you incorporate the neuroscience of attention and awareness into your model.

The firing patterns in your brain get triggered hundreds of milliseconds before you become consciously aware... an eternity in neural timing... so in some sense we’re only ever able to experience versions of the past and never actually exist at the spear point of the ‘present,” despite the strength and durability of that perceptual illusion. 

[quiet]

On sábado, 04 de agosto de 2018 at 3:52 AM, Just wondering said:

Every second we live is one that’s passed, so is there such thing as the present?.

There are bosons. And there are fermions that are grouped and the group behaves like a boson. It could happen that the bosonic behavior was the norm in the more complex levels than the atom and the molecule, which are the levels accessible to our perception.

There is no limit to the number of bosons that can coexist in the same finite region. They coexist without prejudice to each other.

It does not seem impossible that our experience was linked to systems that behave like bosons. In that case, infinite bosonic wave functions could coexist in a limited region. And it is not impossible that our perception is analogous to a radio tuner, which resonates with the wave of the selected station. The dial allows the user to vary the resonance and capture each station individually. That does not mean non-existence of the other stations, whose waves are present in the same region of space.

Nor does it seem impossible that the tuning of our perceptual system can never remain constant, because the Second Principle of Thermodynamics demands an incessant entropic variation. Entropic variation implies functional and / or structural variation. In other words, it implies incessant variation of tuning in our perceptual system. The lives of Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, correspond to waves in a region. If those waves are bosonic, nothing demands that they have lost existence. They can perfectly coexist with the waves of everything existing in the same region, this coexistence encompassing everything we perceive as events corresponding to different times. If instead of undergoing the incessant change of tuning caused by the entropic variation, we could command the tuning of our perception as the tuning of a radio, maybe we could live with Archimedes, with Galileo or with Newton.

Our notion of time, divided into past, present and future, has nothing in common with the variable [math]t[/math] of physics. The laws of physics accept all the values of [math]t[/math] and work coherently with everyone. In physics, the values of [math]t[/math] correspond to what we call the past, what we call present and what we call the future.

It is not impossible that we live in a bosonic world, where everything coexists, without us being able to perceive everything because our perceptual system operates in resonance.

[Itoero]

On ‎4‎/‎08‎/‎2018 at 8:52 AM, Just wondering said:

ery second we live is one that’s passed, so is there such thing as the present? It’s supposed to be the present as I’m writing this and here it is, in the past.

We constantly travel through time. The present is imo  an agreed time period between past and future. The length of this time period differs depending on the context 'present' is used in.