I'm trying to finish my micro book stack before getting back to Cornell this Saturday since I have too many books to bring back in my carry-on. If your unread book stack isn't 10x bigger than your read stack, are you even a reader? Currently whittling through the dense The History of Western Philosophy.
Saint Augustine believed "neither Past nor Future, but only the Present, really is." This aligns with a belief I've had for at least a year:
- the Past is memory
- the Present is observation of the phenomena in this exact moment
- the Future is expectation
The Past is memory and is BS (eyewitness testimony is not inherently reliable)—I don't even trust stuff that happened minutes ago. Too many things can impact the way you perceive events, from your blood sugar to REM cycles. The Future hasn't happened yet and is what you expect it to be. I often live in the Past or Future and struggle to differentiate my dreams from my past reality (e.g., I think I've had a conversation with someone but I don't know if they are a figment of my imagination or if I actually spoke to them. Sometimes the memories are just internal rehearsed conversations of my daydreams of the future). Days feel like hours and the Future feels like the Past.
The only reality is the Present. Time isn't real. Our perception of the present is far from the "truth" (100-200ms behind)—we observe a tiny slice of radiation with imperfect hardware and software. If the present has zero duration, it doesn't exist. If the present has a non-zero duration, it contains (largely) memory and (minimal) expectation already. But the (imperfect) present may be our closest peek at the truth.
Augustine believed God created everything out of nothing, including time, but lives outside of it. "God is eternal, in the sense of being timeless. In God, there is no before and after, but only an eternal present." We may experience the eternal present—beyond time—once we realize we're being duped... or I'm just tweaking. Time is an emergent illusion.
There are so many illusions around us: from living in a democratic republic and wielding free will to not existing in a simulation and perceiving reality accurately. We peer through a slit in a cave at a shadow of a warped space that we call Truth.