Live In Present: Ramblings on its cogency

 “Live in present” is the message we are bombarded with all the time.  It sounds rational. Past is already gone, you cannot change it. Who has seen the future? Anything could happen, not under your control at all.

But I wonder, what is present? It is normally conceived almost as a real and tangible period between the past and the future. But how long it is: an hour, a day, a year?  A nanosecond before is past and a nanosecond in front is future.   As Einstein put it “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion".

I think no one can live in present or past. We are fabricated to live in future. Whether it is a blessing or a curse depends on our viewpoint. We are always thinking/planning what to do next. It may be the next second or the next year but all our waking time we are going to do something. I am writing this piece now but is it in present? Before I type the word on the keyboard the brain/mind has to think ahead as to what I would be doing next. Take another example cooking a dinner. One is always planning what to do next, cut the vegetables, put the cooker on , pour the oil in the pan and so on. Not just these mundane chores but even building a nation or executing a war is done on what next basis. What we call present is actually immediate future. People then quantify the length of future time that is assigned as present according to their own preconceptions. And now it becomes even more interesting because preconception is nothing but past. So past determines the bit of future which we call present.

Does it mean then that future and present both are predetermined? No, it does not have to be because luckily, past itself is not certain in our universe even though it has already passed. This seems completely bonkers but such is the world of quantum physics.

At the moment the best rational explanation of the intricacies of our universe is by the model which incorporates quantum theory. Although I have serious problem in understanding it, I have to take the words of Professor Stephen W. Hawking: “Quantum physics --------------- leads us to accept a new form of determinism: Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty” (Grand Design, 2010).

Present Time by Antony Gormley
1986 - 1989

As the past is not fixed we are free to try to make our future and hence our present as best as we can. And this is I think what represents “live in present”.

What a tortuous way to appreciate the obvious!