Do you believe in the present?

[greenwizard]

light is completely independent of time, or speed, it is a universal constant, remember that things are not always what they seem to be, humans perception of light is just one of them, same thing with time.

 

[Tunnelvision]

imo..."time" is just a word for describing a process that we made up ourself to control the chaos. and we all know you cant control chaos. You maybe can divide it in segments to understand it a little better.

 

[st.bot.32]

when do you experience this?

i'm speaking literally i guess.. you cannot ever experience the present, because consciousness isn't an instantaneously occurring process. going back in this thread a ways, awareness lags behind the present ever so slightly.

the concept of perceiving "now" is just the awareness of the moment, which I call time travel

Conveniently enough for us, our brains more or less all interpret the flow of time at about the same speed, otherwise things would get.. pretty interesting. imagining what life different than ours could be like, where consciousness and the perceived 'now' operate over vastly different time scales has made for some smashing classic sci-fi stories

 

[greenwizard]

hahaha, thats right, that would be quite interesting to watch in a raccoons point of view.

 

[deadflagblues]

i tried my own time space experiment just now. you can do it too. basically, you just say "now" when you become aware of the present moment... i have concluded that the present is actually the past and future in memory and anticipation at the same time actually, i freaked my girlfriend out by randomly shouting "NOW!...NNNNNOW!. NOW NOW NOW??" haha im sorry

 

[Cammoflage]

The present is the only wave we can manipulate with our fysical body .. should i get a beer or not... when the choise is made you can have an effect on the present.. you can only pick up that beer in the present! You can also think about picking up that beer tomorrow,... but the act itself can only be done in the present.

Therefor the present is the only timewave we can manipulate with actions

The future can only be manipulated with thougts... but they become actions in the present,..or there wil be no manipulation

The past can only be manipulated with lies!

my 2 cents (srry for bad engish)

 

[Forkbender]

i'm speaking literally i guess.. you cannot ever experience the present, because consciousness isn't an instantaneously occurring process. going back in this thread a ways, awareness lags behind the present ever so slightly.

But it is your present, eventhough it happened earlier. You can only be aware of something that is happening at the same time. You cannot be aware of a newspaper being delivered yesterday, only of the memory thereof, which is happening 'now'.

 

[BrainEater]

i agree with forkbender.

awareness of the now obviously happens in the now. s.t.bot32? are you referring to a supposed conciousness lag, because there is time needed for the brain to process, etc. ?

 

[Icelus]

I do not believe in the present. Why should I? For me it's crystal clear that the present is all there is. That's not a believe, it's a truth!

 

[IJesusChrist]

To enjoy the present is an ultimate goal.

To not connect feelings of the present to the future is important, unless they are good, but even then, it may not be.

"Live in the now"
"Live like every day is your last"
"Like no tommorrow"

These all stem from this belief, but usually nobody can really understand the absolute present. I believe I can, but I know I don't.

 

[st.bot.32]

awareness of the now obviously happens in the now. s.t.bot32? are you referring to a supposed conciousness lag, because there is time needed for the brain to process, etc. ?

more or less. greenwizard got the reference. you can measure the speed signals travel through the central nervous system. the human body does not respond or operate in a single instant in time, even though from our human perspective it may seem that way. if you were a large dinosaur for example IIRC the hypothesis being it took a significant amount of time for signals from all around the body to reach the brain... on the other hand to a small bird that moves with a significantly faster reaction time than we do, we must seem to be slow and lumbering. the interpretation of the flow of time clearly varies.. even amongst humans to some degree

it's amazing how our brains have evolved to react/interpret the world so well that we can easily take the way we interpret things for granted, including time. a day, yesterday, all are practical human measurements relative to the rate our conscious processes occur over time and how we experience our "now"

 

[BrainEater]

you think this awareness lag is so signifcant? anyways you experience it as now so whats the difference, considering that it is like almost now.

i mean it takes in a human veeeeeeeery small fractions of a second, so really whats the big deal about that ???


cant seem to get your point st.bot sorry.

 

[st.bot.32]

you think this awareness lag is so signifcant? anyways you experience it as now so whats the difference, considering that it is like almost now.

i mean it takes in a human veeeeeeeery small fractions of a second, so really whats the big deal about that ???

this thread has talked about time and perception of time quite a lot. that's what this is about... this is where everything happens.. it's what makes the perceived 'now' possible. and the more you delve into it the more fascinating it gets. it's not as simple as perceiving the world in some infinitesimal slice of time. hence i used the term 'window'. (additionally, certain aspects like how we interpret our senses can be explored, and even used practically.)

if perception of the now doesn't seem interesting, try exploring it the next time you experience time in a completely non-linear order on a high dose psychedelic trip or during deep meditation

 

[Forkbender]

^I remember a session on a box of Hawaiians and a MAOi in which everything happened now for about three hours. It was very blissful and truly set my mind free. I understand that the physical process takes time before something reaches awareness, but awareness is always in what we call the present, although its object may be in the past or future.

 

[st.bot.32]

i agree, and i hope i don't sound like i'm being overly pedantic. i just find it all genuinely quite interesting. the more you try to learn, the deeper the mystery gets!

i've had a few experiences meditating and later taking LSD where I was experiencing time in a very different way.. my perceived 'now' was seemingly jumping forwards and backwards, or my perception of time was that it almost ground to a halt, people moving in sllllooowwww motion, stopping dead in their tracks.. yet for all of the above i was consciously aware that my perception of time was drastically altered, i was still experiencing some continuity of thought

 

[greenwizard]

^its is interesting, how you could watch your perception of time changing, like an observer. in theory, your perception would always be the same, only different to an outside observer, but it seems that is you

 

[mrvitorsky]

The gift of right now is the greatest present.

 

[Envix]

Time is the measurement of an immeasurable force. It does, in fact, exist; but not in our dimension. We see time how a 2-dimensional object sees a 3-dimensional object.
(i.e. we only see a brief part of it, but not the whole thing)

We can not understand it because we are in the third dimension. Time is the fourth dimension.

Living in the fourth dimension, time would appear as space. Time would be as easily navigable and observable as space is to us in the third dimension.
It's hard to explain :/


edit: in the link I posted, imagine the apple is time.

 

[Forkbender]

^that doesn't make sense to me.

If time is the fourth dimension, it would mean that it is just 1 dimensional (as we already have 3 others).

It would be more understandable if you'd say that time is 3-d or whatever, but then I would have a hard time picturing it, just like you say.

Anyway, I don't bother with time too much, I like where I'm at.

 

[st.bot.32]

^same, not to me either. theoretically there are additional spacial dimensions that can exist, they can be calculated, but they are not 'time'. wikipedia search a tesseract, here is an example.. which is a 3d view of a 4d cube animated and rotating.

with enough patience, a small bit of reading (and in my case a bit of ganga :wink: ) you can intuitively figure out what is going on more or less, how the object is rotating, how it theoretically manifests in 4 spacial dimensions and therefore in 3. but all 4 spacial dimensions are still manifesting at one point in time--the present.

you can travel through space and around objects, with time that is a completely different story. there's no real consensus on whether traveling through time is even possible. if it's possible then that means the universe is a linear progression only from our perspective (the present), wheras in reality it is basically already laid out from beginning to end, so choose your destination. on the other hand perhaps time is a lot like a spacial dimension.. you might go back in time to discover there is absolutely nothing there at all. everything has already traveled through that point in time leaving nothing behind. i suspect it will be a while before we have the technology to answer these questions (or even know the right questions to ask!)