A common illustration that the past, present, and future all exist is a raft on a river. You’re sitting on your Huck Finn raft floating down the middle of a river. Since the raft is being carried along with the current, the river appears stationary. It is the ‘present’. The landscape you’ve already floated by is the ‘past’, and what you see downstream is the ‘future’. You can see that they still exist, even though they are no longer or not yet in your ‘present’.
If time is a continuum, then the past, present, and future should all exist even if you can’t perceive the first and last; just like ‘-2’ and ‘57’ exist on a number line even if your finger is on ‘18’. But in the river example, what if we get to the ‘future’ and a bomb detonates? We didn’t see that coming! And is the past really still there? Or is it annihilated moment by moment and only exists in our memory?
Actually, every time we look at a star, or the Sun, or the Moon, or our fingertips, we’re looking at the past; since it takes time for the light to reach our eyes. Einstein said ‘for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one’. But Einstein’s Theory breaks down at the quantum level, right? What do current theories say about it?
You can’t go there or look at it, so it certainly doesn’t exist in the sense that the ballpoint pen I’m looking at right now exists. In fact, it’s an abstraction to even say that the pen is the same pen that was there five seconds ago. And it doesn’t exist as, say, a perfect circle exists, because that is a definition that once comprehended is the same for everyone. But I guess it does exist in the sense that the concept of justice exists. We all think we know what it is but after five minutes we’re arguing like hell over it. A pretty poor form of existence if you ask me.
This, the opinion of a history and genealogy buff. Go figure. Maybe it’s the Buddhist in me.
Nope, the past is gone; all the atoms that comprised the past have been recycled into the present. This is why time travel is impossible: becuase you and i contain millions of atoms that were once part of other people. Take my body-I have several million atoms that were once part of Julius Caesar-he doesn’t exist anymore.
The past still exists. The words that I said in 1986 are still there in the form of sound waves. Maybe someday a device will be able to detect them in space and I can prove to my husband once and for all that he did so promise me a Golden Retriever on our wedding day.
And since time is relative, our wedding day is probably still happening if we go faster than the speed of light. But that would mean certain people are still alive who have been deceased for a while. Would life be eternal then depending on our hypothetical speed? Or will I forever be just on the edge of the past?
/Side note to English majors: Why did so many poets repeat themselves?
Still, that all inertial frames are equal, and that the speed of light is constant in all inertial frames, means that the notion of ‘present’ – what happens simultaneous to any given event – is relative; there’s no absolute way to say whether two events happen at the same time if they are spatially separated: depending on the motion of the observer, it might well be that they see event A before B, both simultaneously, or even B before A. Thus, each observer’s notion of ‘present’ – their simultaneous hyperplane – depends on their motion, and events that lie in your past may well lie in some other observer’s present; so, in that sense, the past does exist.
However, causality is preserved, despite perhaps an at first a contrary impression; if events A and B are separated in such a way that a ray of light could have reached one from the other, i.e. if the distance between them is such that a ray of light could cross it in the time that elapses between them viewed from some frame of reference, then they are separated that way in all frames of reference – if a signal could travel from A to B, then A occurs before B to all possible observers. In that way, events in your causal past (i.e. those events that could have influenced you, by at least sending a ray of light your way) are always in your past, and there is no frame of reference from where any of them would appear to be concurrent to you.
The concept is known as the relativity of simultaneity, and it essentially means that the ‘river’ picture of time doesn’t really work that way, since there’s no such simple way to separate time in past, present, and future.
The sound waves are long since gone. The radio waves, if any were created then, are 23 light years away and weakening fast.
At any rate, those are not the past, they are recordings of the past. It would be no truer to say that since I have some Beatles CDs, John Lennon is still alive. Or that since the pyramids are still standing, Egypt is still ruled by a pharoah.
Yes to your last question. The past is remembered but not perfectly, so even from a philosophical standpoint the thing that we term ‘the past’ is at best nebulous. Events that lead up to the future are not predetermined, so the future is likewise unreal until it actually happens.
The sentence “Does the past exist” is a sentence with an extra assumed word: “Does the past exist now?”
“Does” means “now”.
If you meant in the past you’d have said DID the past exist?
As such it’s a nonsensical question. The sense in which the past exists is a different sense than the sense in which reality is what is happening NOW. “To exist” is generally also a term in which “now” is implicit.
Clinton: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
Gary T (ehoing nivlac): “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘exist’ is, and/or what the meaning of the word ‘past’ is.”
To wit: Any given moment in, or period of, time is no longer extant. Nor is any action that previously occurred. In that sense, the past is gone and does not exist. However, the past as a concept certainly exists, and the past as a record and understanding of what has gone before likewise exists.
All perception is of the past. Aside from the obvious fact that light from my hand or the sun takes time to reach my eyes and therefore presents a view of a past state, the images I receive are always interpreted to fit my past experience.
I see only the past. It does not exist. It ismaya.
Take the so-called Andromeda paradox, for example: two observers, moving at a different relative velocity, won’t agree on what’s happening ‘now’ in the Andromeda galaxy. Indeed, one might conclude that now something happens that, to the other, lies in the past of what he calculates as happening now! One of them might say that now, the Andromedans are debating whether or not to invade Earth; the other, with equal justification, might claim that the invasion fleet is already on its way (of course, neither could actually see this, light taking some 300,000 years to reach us from there). To the Andromedans, zooming along in their spaceships, the conference coming to the decision to launch the fleet lies in the past.
So, there exists an observer to whom whatever lies in your past is in his present. If you had cereals for breakfast yesterday morning, there exists a frame of reference in which you are eating them right now. In what way, then, could the past ‘not exist’?
In that it exists only subjectively and referentially. It does not exist now. It existed then.
The Andromeda Paradox ignores the fact that there is a consistent ‘now’ at every point in space, the distance between those spaces merely another subjective unit of measure. How long news of that person’s decision would take to get here is immaterial; that person made that decision at a specific point in time. Just as we know light from distant stars is ‘fossil light,’ we know it was created at a specific point in time, and that time is in the past. It is not the same light currently being emitted by the same star.
It’s the present that doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. Because all you know of this moment is an imperfectly remembered memory of a moment ago filtered through flawed interpretations of an infinity of past misremembered memories. It’s a miracle anything ever gets done.