On the present:

Required Reading: Infinity, Infinite divisibility, Zeno's paradoxes

Prelude - The following propositions and notes are based largely upon extrapolations and inferences I made from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (and certain of his followers) and the rationalist metaphysics described in the Ethics of Baruch Spinoza. There are elements of this philosophy that seem like science fiction, or don't seem plausible. It is the nature of metaphysics that concrete proof is not likely to exist.

The present is not a single point in time.

This is because time is infinitely divisible into smaller parts. The divisions we make within time are arbitrary, such as 365 days per year, 24 hours per day, 60 minutes per hour, 60 seconds per minute. Seconds divide into centiseconds, milliseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds, and so on. These divisions are not inherent in time, and could easily have been different.

You could make an infinite number of divisions in time, be they infinitely smaller or infinitely larger. As a result, any attempt to pinpoint the present to an exact point in time is practically impossible. By any human standard, that exact moment has already become the past by the time it is perceived. For that reason, it's convenient for us to think of the present as an approximate value of time; a relative duration.

For example, you might think of today as the present, but one day is a pretty large increment of time by human standards. One day has the capacity to be divided into several smaller parts - but the same is applicable to minutes, and any other measurement. The upshot is that any attempt to describe the present in human terms becomes a clumsy “the present is now, now, now, now, now, now, now, etc.” This is to say that the present is transitory. This moment; this present is already past.

By that same token, if the present is past before we fully perceive it, then the present has a firm grounding in the future, though, admittedly, it does not extend forward very far. To explain: the perception of the present as being a duration of time rather than a specific point means that the duration includes both a moment that has already happened and a moment that is about to happen. Without that anticipatory element, the duration would only be past.

The result, if you can keep up, is that the present is both the past and the future at once, so far as our perception is concerned – it sits on the fence, so to speak.

Obviously our brains can't even conceive of the infinitesimally small increment of time that would be required to actually pinpoint the present. This is made worse by the fact that such an increment would be getting infinitely smaller (because the smaller it is, the more accurate). The result being that a measurement could never actually be made, because the increments we measure with would always be getting smaller and smaller, and never actually reach the point.

Even if humans had the capacity to experience a nanosecond as though it were an hour or a day or a year, that nanosecond itself is infinitely divisible into infinitely smaller increments, such that pinpointing the present cannot be possible. In other words, the present, as anything other than a broad, relative duration (like we normally perceive it), cannot exist.


Next Week: On the paradox of infinite divisibility in which I try to deal with getting from here to there without any idea of where and when here and there actually are...