Pinning down NOW

[Ablaze]

There is only now, no past and no future. No matter what time it is, it's always now, eternally now. There was no yesterday and there will be no tomorrow. These are temporal projections, present moments that have passed or have yet to arise, forgotten now's and now's still waiting to be born. Reality is an unbroken succession of now's, neither the same nor different from the now's that supposedly precede or follow them. Now is the only reality.

 

[factseeker88]

There is only now, no past and no future. No matter what time it is, it's always now, eternally now. There was no yesterday and there will be no tomorrow.
Now is the only reality.

That's the perceptive, emotional, personal take, and has nothing to do with the practical world.

:no::no::no:

“What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is WHAT WE DO.” John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

 

[DreadFish]

That's the perceptive, emotional, personal take, and has nothing to do with the practical world.

:no::no::no:

“What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is WHAT WE DO.” John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

So is linear time and cause-effect relation.

 

[raw_thought]

When I said that "now" does not have a privileged status, I was not saying "now" is a meaningless term. When I was born it was now. Similarly, when I say ," I am here" that is not a meaningless statement. It simply means that I am here and not ( lets say Africa) there. However, North Carolina is not a privileged place. If someone in Africa said they are here ( in Africa) their statement would be just as accurate as mine.
Time is the 4th dimension, just like length, breadth and width. "now" is just the temporal dimensions way of saying "here".

 

[Gordian Knot]

I wonder if it is more appropriate to say that 'now' is merely the perception that we as a species are capable of understanding. Because our perception is so very limited.

In point of fact, now is actually a zillionth of a second ago. What we perceive as now is what happened between the time when the event happened versus the time our eyes and brain were able to construct what we saw.

We do not see things in real time. So it is with all our senses. It may be fractions of a second difference; that makes it no less relevant.

And no more relevant either. This is how a human processes events. That we are constantly a brief time behind what happened makes no real difference because that is how our senses work.

 

[Ablaze]

That's the perceptive, emotional, personal take, and has nothing to do with the practical world.

:no::no::no:

“What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is WHAT WE DO.” John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

And that's your take.

:yes::yes::yes:

Now has everything to do with the practical world. Nothing could be more practical than the immediate experience.

 

[DreadFish]

So, the question for me is, can we really pin anything down as being now?

It seems that now is never a thing that can really be pinned down. Various things are constantly happening and don't all happen at the exact same time in perfectly spaced out intervals like the ticking of a clock.

Now seems to be more like a process, a fluid happening. If the future is only a potential that could be manifest in the now and the past just one what was once experienced in the now, there never has been an experience of anything but now. Though, physically, we experience things after they happen, we are experiencing them now, not later.

So, I don't think we can box now into a series of moments, how can you really quantify a moment? Now can't appropriately be considered a moment that passes and is then replaced by a new moment, each now; that would require now to be a measurable instance.

Now seems like more of an ongoing process, the only ongoing process that is ever going on. From that point of view, it seems that the past and future, as we normally define them, can only be inaccurate in describing the actual realities of them, IMO. If a person were to travel into the relative future of what is happening in the collective now, he would still be in the now, as far as he is concerned and what is our now, he would consider his past.

I don't think we can ever pin down now as any particular thing. It will just have to be a word to express the condition of experience. While the ideas of past and future are dependent on the idea of now to be valid, the idea of now does not necessarily depend on past and future to be valid, yet without them, I think the idea of now would take on a totally different meaning, though it would still be the only process of experience ever going on.

Perhaps everything is always happening right now and our location in it defines what we would consider to be the past or the future. That would make placement in time and space relative and ultimately without objective value, but only indicative of what objects an individual is experiencing as now.

 

[Straw Dog]

The past, present, and future are all contained within presence.

 

[Straw Dog]

In literature and movie scrips, yes, but not in real life

I do not understand your objection. Please clarify.

 

[factseeker88]

I do not understand your objection. Please clarify.

Ruskin can explain it better than me.

:yes::yes::yes:

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]factseeker88[/FONT]


“[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is WHAT WE DO.” John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) [/FONT]

 

[factseeker88]

The past, present, and future are all contained within presence.

Past and present, yes but not the future that has yet to happen.

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]factseeker88[/FONT]


“[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is WHAT WE DO.” John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) [/FONT]