• Pierre-Normand
    2.2k
    As I was setting up a new blog, I homed in on the issue of the thickness of the present as my first topic since it is, to me, a fascinating issue. I'll reproduce this blog post (part 1) below for the sake of discussion. I had written it with a view of making the topic accessible to a wide readership. It's not meant to be uncontentious. Moments ago, as I was using the search tool in this forum, I realized that I had already discussed this topic at some length in someone's thread about presentism (in this post and follow-up posts), five years ago. I had completely forgotten my earlier discussion but it summarizes some of the ideas that I was planning to explain on my blog. So, here is the blog post:

    '[...]“how long is the present?” is not a question we understand, for it is asked outside of any context, and that therefore, “a vanishing instant” is not an answer we understand either.

    There is no “real” present, any more than there is a “real” context: the entire symphony, its first movement, the movement’s 100th measure, are on equal standing, as are the presents associated with the performance of them.
    ' —Yuval Dolev [1]



    In this blog post, I am going to discuss the philosophical topic of the thickness of the present—that is, how long our experience of what is happening now lasts, and how long now lasts. I will save for a follow-up the discussion of this topic's implications for poker, in general, and its use for dealing with variance in poker, more specifically. Right now, let us focus wholly on the philosophical idea.

    Whenever we ponder about the passage of time, we do it from the perspective of our present experience of it. We can focus on what is happening now, and distinguish this from events that have already passed, which we can remember and can no longer influence, as well as event that haven't happened yet, and that we are yet to possibly experience, influence or bring about in the near or more distant future. Some of the events that we are experiencing now, as we are experiencing them, still are in the process of unfolding. Those processes, and our involvement in them, either as observers or as actors, have a duration; they don't occur in an instant.

    When temporally extended human experiences happen, such as listening to Beethoven's Pastoral symphony, what we experience in the moment is conditioned by what happened before and and by our expectation of what is to come. Music usually has a narrative structure and just like the experience of reading a novel can't be what it is without the memory of what was read in earlier chapters, or without the expectation of what will be read in subsequent chapters, music can't either have the same aesthetic and emotional impact that it has, in the present moment, without the stage setting that occurred when listening to the beginning of the piece (or remembering it) or without the expectation and anticipation of what must follow and is yet to be heard.

    Thinking about the temporal experience of listening to music, or of reading a novel, can be misleading, though, if we think of the perceptual process as something that takes place wholly during the very short duration of a "present moment" and if we think of this momentary "present moment" of experience as being merely externally constrained by the past through the exercise of short term memory and by the imaginative anticipation of a future experience that has not yet occurred.

    In order to understand why it is misleading to think of our present experiences in this way, consider a useful analogy to the question "What is the duration of now?" The analogical question is: "What is the spatial extension of here?" Just like the English words "now", "here" is an indexical expression. It designates the place where the person who makes use of it is located at the time when she make use of it. Likewise, the word "now" designates the moment in time when the person makes use of that word to make reference to this moment. I would therefore argue that, just like it makes no sense to try to restrict the location of here to a single unextended point in space, it makes no sense either to pinpoint the time of now to an instantaneous moment in time. The reason is similar. The reason why here can refer in different contexts to our seating position in a theater, to the room we are in, to the city we are visiting, to the badminton court where we are playing, and so on, is because we are embodied creatures who inhabit the space around us and, since our bodies take space, and our activities take even more space, what is being referred to with the word here is the place where our bodily selves are located and where they are busying themselves in various activities. Likewise, the activities we are engaged in, and our conscious apprehension of them, take time.

    There may appear to be a disanalogy between the two cases, though. While we can hardly make sense of the idea of pinpointing the location of here to a place that is much smaller than our own bodies, there does not appear to exist a principled limit to the shrinking of the present moments that we can consciously attend to. Consider the sequence of questions and answers that we might provide to someone who is texting us from a remote location:

    Where are you?

    I'm in Montreal.

    Where in Montreal?

    At the Salle Wilfrid Pelletier

    Where are you seated?

    Seat DD7 on the parterre




    It would not make much sense for our distant interlocutor to ask us to pinpoint our location much more precisely than that. Contrast this with a different sequence of questions regarding now.

    What are you doing?

    I'm vacationing Montreal until next month

    What are you doing tonight?

    I'm attending to a performance of Beethoven's 6th symphony

    What part of it is currently being performed?

    Currently, it's the second movement: Scene by the Brook




    Clearly the dialogue need not stop there. Within our experience of listening to this movement, there is our experience of listening to successive musical phrases, themes or melodies; within each phrase, there is our experience of listening to successive chords and notes. When a chord or note is held for some significant duration, we can also attend to variations in dynamics and timbre, the beginning of a string vibrato, etc. What we can attend to as the auditory experience that is occurring now indeed seems to shrink to an unextended albeit moving present instant.

    However, as I had suggested earlier, music pieces having a narrative structure (as well as melodic, harmonic, thematic and other formal structures) are, like many other human experiences and activities, composed of moments that gain their meaning from the surrounding context and hence can't be separated from such structures. The manner in which an individual momentary note or chord are heard very much depend on their harmonic functions and their places in the whole work, and something similar can be said for structures at all the temporal scales: The last movement of the symphony, labelled by Beethoven "Shepherd's song. Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm", wouldn't be heard the same way if it were removed from the context of the whole symphony, which includes, of course, the previous movement that depicts vividly the sound and mood of the storm itself.

    So, I would like to suggest, just like the depiction of here as a fairly precise location (e.g. being seated at the BB7 parterre seat) is no more uniquely representative of the real here than are the spatially wider locations (Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, Montreal, etc.) where our extended stretches of activity take place, likewise, the depiction of what we are hearing, experiencing, or doing now also is context dependent and can encompass the hearing of a musical theme, of a symphonic movement, or, indeed, of a whole symphony. In this manner, I want to say that the present moment, which we designate with the word now, not only is temporally extended rather than instantaneous, but its thickness is context dependent and hence relative to whatever wider context of experience gives meaning to the very many moments of shorter duration that make up this experience or activity.

    My argument isn't complete though. In order to spell it out more fully and make it more plausible, it will prove useful to mention the main source of the intuition that the objective flow of time can be understood as the movement of an instantaneous present moment that represents a moving cutting edge between the growing past and the shrinking future. Although this intuition finds its source in the scientific view of the world, physicists themselves have warned that it is misleading. So, comparing and contrasting the (allegedly objective) scientific view of time with the experienced or lived view of time will be our task in the second part of this post.



    [1] Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives, The MIT Press, 2007

    [2] Robert Efron, "The Duration of the Present", Interdisciplinary Perspective of Time, Volume 138, Issue 2, February 1967

    [3] Martijn Wallage, "Living in the Present", Philosophy, Volume 95, Issue 3, July 2020, pp. 285-307

    [4] Lewis S. Ford, "The Duration of the Present", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 100-106, September 1974

    [5] Britany A. Gentry, "Measuring the present: What is the duration of ‘now’?" Synthese, Volume 198, pp. 9357–9371, 2021
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    Thinking about the temporal experience of listening to music, or of reading a novel, can be misleading, though, if we think of the perceptual process as something that takes place wholly during the very short duration of a "present moment" and if we think of this momentary "present moment" of experience as being merely externally constrained by the past through the exercise of short term memory and by the imaginative anticipation of a future experience that has not yet occurred.Pierre-Normand

    Are you familiar with the concept of the ‘specious present’, which I think was coined by William James? The idea, presented famously by Husserl, is that the present moment is a tripartite structure that consists of retention , primal presentation and protention (anticipation). Retention and protention don’t occupy separate temporal positions relative to the ‘now’, they all belong simultaneously to it.

    In the account of Heidegger and also Gendlin, this is put more radically:

    “Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

    “The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(Gendlin)
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.2k
    Are you familiar with the concept of the ‘specious present’, which I think was coined by William James? The idea, presented famously by Husserl, is that the present moment is a tripartite structure that consists of retention , primal presentation and protention (anticipation). Retention and protention don’t occupy separate temporal positions relative to the ‘now’, they all belong simultaneously to it.Joshs

    No, I wasn't familiar with this concept at all. It seems quite relevant to my topic, though. So, thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to look it up further and give it some thought.
  • Luke
    2.6k
    its thickness is context dependent and hence relative to whatever wider context of experience gives meaning to the very many moments of shorter duration that make up this experience or activity.Pierre-Normand

    I agree with this. The meaning of the word "present" is found in its use, and it can be used to mean the present second, minute, hour, day, month, year, millennium, etc., just as the word "here" can be used to mean here where I am standing or here in our galaxy.

    In order to spell it out more fully and make it more plausible, it will prove useful to mention the main source of the intuition that the objective flow of time can be understood as the movement of an instantaneous present moment that represents a moving cutting edge between the growing past and the shrinking future.Pierre-Normand

    I look forward to it! From what I've read it is more the concern of presentism's critics who question the length of the present moment. Whatever its length, our experience of aging and being conscious through time need to be accounted for by non-presentists and/or those who argue that the present moment and the flow of time are illusory. What sort of illusion is that?
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.2k
    I look forward to it! From what I've read it is more the concern of presentism's critics who question the length of the present moment.Luke

    That's a good point. It's funny how presentists and eternalists have argued against each other while seemingly both relying on the shared assumption that time is external to the observers (and/or agents) who inhabits the world. The former view time as something that flows all by itself and takes us for the ride while the latter acknowledge the essential perspectival nature of time (that is, of McTaggart's A Series aspect of time) but thereby tend to degrade it as an illusion. What I want to argue is that the present moment is real because it is perspectival and thick in a way that is loosely similar to the way in which, say, paper money has real value because, through our social practices, we invest it with value. The analogy is quite imperfect, of course, but it is just meant to convey that something can be both essentially subjective (perspectival) and objectively real.
  • Luke
    2.6k
    What I want to argue is that the present moment is real because it is perspectival and thick in a way that is loosely similar to the way in which, say, paper money has real value because, through our social practices, we invest it with value.Pierre-Normand

    I'm not sure I follow. Non-presentists take the present moment to be unreal despite its perspectival (indexical) appearance. As someone with more presentist leanings, I consider our apparent aging and movement through time to be objective facts that are independent of our social practices.
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    The present can be any "thickness" we want:

    1. An instant (0)
    2. A year (365 days)
    3. A decade (10 years)
    .
    .
    .

    An instant though is useless as change takes time and cause-effect is change. Nothing can be done in an instant (re Zeno's arrow paradox). The present then must have some "thickness" for it to be usable (meaningful).
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    12.3k

    When we take the present as "thick", it is inevitable that some part of "now" is future, and some part of "now" is past. I think this is what refers to. If we describe this as tripartite there is two distinct ways of doing that. One would be to say that this part of past, along with this part of future, is a unity which we call now. In this case we need to determine the principle which unites into a "now", to determine how "thick" the now is. In this sense, the past and future are not actually separated from each other, as having a real difference from each other, because they are united in one "now". The other way is to assume that the unity is artificial, arbitrary, or not real, and that within the appearance of a thick "now", there is some real past, some real future, and a divisor, which is the true "now".

    Which side of these two ways looks more plausible to you? Is there a real distinction between past and future, or not?
  • Present awareness
    128
    Time is a measurement taken from the zero point, which is now. The zero point is infinite as it may not be measured.
  • Alkis Piskas
    2.1k

    Nice topic. But also a dangerous one; it's a field with hidden mines! :smile:

    There is no “real” present, any more than there is a “real” context: the entire symphony, its first movement, the movement’s 100th measure, are on equal standing, as are the presents associated with the performance of them.' —Yuval Dolev [1]Pierre-Normand
    Nice quote. Present needs indeed a context. I would put though a stop at the place of the first comma. Because even context does not make the present "real". It can only provide a frame of reference, based on which we can enclose, define, limit it. And that has to be continuous. I can say, for example, that right now I'm writing a message, but I cannot locate any specific moment during this period by saying "Now!" or "This!"etc. Because until I have spelled or even thought of it, that moment would have already passed. Time is continuous and thus indivisible. Hence there cannot be a "real" present. In other words, there's no actually such a thing as a "present".

    Whenever we ponder about the passage of time, we do it from the perspective of our present experience of it.Pierre-Normand
    Just a remark on "Whenever": We can talk about the "passage of time" from a lot of different aspects and for a lot of reasons, not only from or based on our present experience, as you say. But, OK, you are referring specifically to one of them.

    our involvement in them, either as observers or as actors, have a duration; they don't occur in an instant.Pierre-Normand
    Right. This is quite similar to what I described earlier.

    When temporally extended human experiences happen, such as listening to Beethoven's Pastoral symphony, what we experience in the moment is conditioned by what happened before and by our expectation of what is to come.Pierre-Normand
    Nice! I liked that! :smile:

    consider a useful analogy to the question "What is the duration of now?"Pierre-Normand
    OK, you have already brought in the element of context. This, and what I described earlier, apply to this question, too.

    it makes no sense either to pinpoint the time of now to an instantaneous moment in timePierre-Normand
    Right. Similar to what I have already described earlier.
    (Sometimes I'm getting ahead of what is being said or written ... Hope it's no problem for you! :smile:)

    the objective flow of time can be understood as the movement of an instantaneous present moment that represents a moving cutting edge between the growing past and the shrinking future.Pierre-Normand
    Nice! I liked that!

    ___________________

    Well, I think you have handled your topic very well and avoided stepping onto mines! :up:
    And I enjoyed all that! :smile:
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.2k
    I'm not sure I follow. Non-presentists take the present moment to be unreal despite its perspectival (indexical) appearance. As someone with more presentist leanings, I consider our apparent aging and movement through time to be objective facts that are independent of our social practices.Luke

    Interestingly, @hypericin just started a new thread suggesting that some things, like money, might have an intermediate ontological status somewhere in between merely socially constructed concepts and objectively real things. We think of ourselves as living in time, having an autobiographical past, as well as a future, and present opportunities that we are liable to miss. This distinguishes us from non-rational animals who, although they also perceive and act on present opportunities (J.J. Gibson's affordances), don't self-consciously conceive of themselves as living in time. But what distinguishes us from them isn't merely our rich conception of time, but the impact this conception has on what we are and what we can do. In part, it enables us to live in (and build) a much thicker present, or so I would argue. So, although our biological aging processes, and our being passively subjected to environmental changes, aren't mere social constructs, much of the social stuff around us is. This includes the evolving cognitive tools that enable us not just to self-consciously live in time but, because of that, to take charge of the way our (thick) present gives shape our future on the ground of the past.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.2k
    When we take the present as "thick", it is inevitable that some part of "now" is future, and some part of "now" is past. I think this is what ↪Joshs refers to. If we describe this as tripartite there is two distinct ways of doing that. One would be to say that this part of past, along with this part of future, is a unity which we call now. In this case we need to determine the principle which unites into a "now", to determine how "thick" the now is. In this sense, the past and future are not actually separated from each other, as having a real difference from each other, because they are united in one "now". The other way is to assume that the unity is artificial, arbitrary, or not real, and that within the appearance of a thick "now", there is some real past, some real future, and a divisor, which is the true "now".

    Which side of these two ways looks more plausible to you? Is there a real distinction between past and future, or not?
    Metaphysician Undercover

    On my view, the the thick present is unitary rather than its being tripartite. Furthermore, the division between the (thick) present, the past and the future is perspectival and context dependent, but it is nevertheless real since it is causally effective. It is causally effective since the way in which human beings inhabit time, and carve out a structured (thick) present out of it, which consists primarily in them doing things, individually or collectively, conditions the sort of future that takes shape as a result of this temporal process.

    The reason why you can't really say that a thick present interval (or ongoing process) is, 'at any given time', composed of a past, a (thinner) present, and a future, within itself, is that in so doing you are merely shifting the context to a new one, incompatible with the first. The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould once said that he was wary of analysing his own pianistic techniques for purpose of teaching them. He alluded to the story of the centipede who knew how to walk until such a time when she was asked in what order she was moving its legs, at which point the centipede became unable to walk. It is of course actually possible to break down one's technique, for purpose of analysing it, teaching it, or rehearsing aspect of it through practice. The main point of the story, though, for present purposes, is that inhabiting thinner present moments (as happens when you break down your own skillful performances into smaller duration segments) is incompatible with the concurrent wholistic exercise of the skill.
  • frank
    14.5k
    Furthermore, the division between the (thick) present, the past and the future is perspectival and context dependent, but it is nevertheless real since it is causally effectivePierre-Normand

    What separates the present from the past?
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.2k
    What separates the present from the past?frank

    Primarily, on my view, it's the lived practical perspective of a self-conscious rational agent that separates the past from the present, at any given (thick) moment. It's this perspective that is the source of the separation. The present moment, as it occurs, from that perspective, is a moment in time when opportunities for action (or, derivatively, for observation) present themselves to the agent and are being exploited (or are being missed). The past is the time when those opportunities have been realised, in part or in whole, or have been foreclosed. What sorts of actions and opportunities are at issue furnishes the context that determines how thick this present moment is and when it is that (and to what degree) it will have already receded into the past.
  • frank
    14.5k


    Sort of in line with that: I've been thinking lately that imagination increases options and possibilities. A lack of imagination closes down options.

    Or we could say that imagination is about flexibility in our modeling of the world.

    So who has a keener sense of time? The imaginative person or the non? I'm not sure.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.2k
    Nice quote. Present needs indeed a context. I would put though a stop at the place of the first comma. Because even context does not make the present "real". It can only provide a frame of reference, based on which we can enclose, define, limit it. And that has to be continuous. I can say, for example, that right now I'm writing a message, but I cannot locate any specific moment during this period by saying "Now!" or "This!"etc. Because until I have spelled or even thought of it, that moment would have already passed. Time is continuous and thus indivisible. Hence there cannot be a "real" present. In other words, there's no actually such a thing as a "present".Alkis Piskas

    I am rather suggesting that there often is a real thick present moment. This moment is the time during which a still ongoing process in which a rational agent or observer is involved takes place. The fact that at any time during the unfolding of such a process one can further reflect on, or attend to, the fact that some things have already become determinate and other things have not yet become determinate doesn't negate the reality of that thick present. It just shows that multiple thick present moments can overlap, sequentially follow, or be nested within one another. But everyone one of them are equally real, and wholly present (within the perspective of the agent), while they occur, on my view.
  • Luke
    2.6k
    We think of ourselves as living in time, having an autobiographical past, as well as a future, and present opportunities that we are liable to miss. This distinguishes us from non-rational animals who, although they also perceive and act on present opportunities (J.J. Gibson's affordances), don't self-consciously conceive of themselves as living in time. But what distinguishes us from them isn't merely our rich conception of time, but the impact this conception has on what we are and what we can do. In part, it enables us to live in (and build) a much thicker present, or so I would argue.Pierre-Normand

    I take it, then, that your interest here is not really to do with debates over the ontological nature of time itself, or perhaps even to do with the present moment, but is more about our (at least partially) socially-constructed lives within the "autobiographical present", which is enabled by our language and current knowledge about the world. Or something along those lines? Interesting concept, but I'm not actually sure what the description/analogy of "thickness" is supposed to represent. In what sense is our present moment "much thicker" than that of non-rational animals? Can we imagine further into the future and remember further into the past? Or imagine and remember better?
  • Alkis Piskas
    2.1k

    Yes, I got the idea. It's a very interesting point.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.2k
    I take it, then, that your interest here is not really to do with debates over the ontological nature of time itself, or perhaps even to do with the present moment, but is more about our (at least partially) socially-constructed lives within the "autobiographical present", which is enabled by our language and current knowledge about the world.Luke

    I think what you are proposing here is a false dichotomy. I really am interested in the ontological nature of time, or, as I might rather put it, the temporal features of ontological domains. (I prefer this way of putting it since, following Kant, I view the concept of time to be formal rather than material. That doesn't make temporal features of the empirical world any less objective.) There is a sense in which time isn't perspectival in the same way that "now" (the present moment) is perspectival.

    In another sense, allegedly more objective, the main feature of time corresponds to McTaggart's B Series. Events relate to one another through the "...before..." or "...after..." relations. In that perspective there isn't really any flow of time since those ordering relations between events (as well as the temporal separation between them) are eternal. They never change. If A occurred before B, it will always remain the case that A occurred before B. But when we speak of events or processes occurring now, in the past, or in the future, then we are labelling them according to McTaggart's A Series. This way of labelling them (and relabelling them as time flows) is essentially perspectival since there is no way to make sense of those labels being predicated of determinate events from some non-perspectival God's-Eye view of the universe. If there were no human beings in the world, there would be no flow of time and no (thick or thin) present moment either, although events would still be ordered according to B Series. (There would still be something akin to A Series, albeit rather less richly structured, from the vantage point of sentient animals.)

    It doesn't follow from the fact that the application of A Series labels ('past', 'present' or 'future') to specific events or processes is essentially perspectival that this ordering isn't therefore objective. If I must get on a particular bus in order to get to work on time, it matters whether the bus has already passed at the stop where I usually take it (and I therefore missed it) or it is yet to pass (and hence I still have an opportunity to catch it). It matters as an objective fact of life since this event's being located in my past or in my future has a causal impact on my life.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.2k
    It doesn't follow from the fact that the application of A Series labels ('past', 'present' or 'future') to specific events or processes is essentially perspectival that this ordering isn't therefore objective. If I must get on a particular bus in order to get to work on time, it matters whether the bus has already passed at the stop where I usually take it (and I therefore missed it) or it is yet to pass (and hence I still have an opportunity to catch it). It matters as an objective fact of life since this event's being located in my past or in my future has a causal impact on my life.Pierre-Normand

    Now I must quote myself here since there is an obvious rejoinder to what I just said. One might object that my potentially missing the bus because I arrived late to the bus stop doesn't show A Series to be objective. My critic would insist that (objective) B Series are sufficient to causally explain my being late to work. It's because my arrival to the bus stop occurred after the bus's arrival at the same place that I was late to work. This causal fact doesn't grant any objectivity to the A Series, according to this critic. To this rejoinder I would object that in the cases where I arrive in time to the bus stop and I successfully catch it, it is generally not an accident that I do so. And the reason is because my own labeling of those events according to A Series, which is something that human beings must do all of the time when they reason practically about their opportunities, is the cause of my having deliberately gotten there in time and hence is the cause of the two events ending up being ordered in a determinate B Series relation. This sort of causation is rational and formal rather than efficient (or nomological) in the modern scientific sense.
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