I wanted to make my piece in response to this particular prompt ("Beginnings") fairly provocative, so I went all in on presentism. My actual opinion is a bit more nuanced: we carry things from the past in our minds and bodies that have a huge influence on how we act today, and our anticipation of the reasonably likely consequences of our actions curtails our movements too. But 'there is only now' is more poetic and motivational :)
Zoom out a little more, and my belief is that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously - all of them are happening at the same time, all the time. If we were higher-dimensional beings we'd be able to see past, present and future at once rather than moving along a line from one to the other, same as a one-dimensional creature can only see what's right in front of its face (its "future"), whereas as 3-dimensional beings we can see the entire line it's travelling along (every "event" in its life) simultaneously. It doesn't know where the line ends or what's at the end of it, but we do!
Doesn't leave much room for the usual conception of free will, but there ya go...
what a fascinating topic.
Thanks Christian!
This is some pretty great stuff! I find it pretty amusing that I came across someone holding up the opposite view to "there is only now" recently:
https://matthewgindin.substack.com/p/there-is-more-than-now
What is that, anti-synchronicity? Haha.
I wanted to make my piece in response to this particular prompt ("Beginnings") fairly provocative, so I went all in on presentism. My actual opinion is a bit more nuanced: we carry things from the past in our minds and bodies that have a huge influence on how we act today, and our anticipation of the reasonably likely consequences of our actions curtails our movements too. But 'there is only now' is more poetic and motivational :)
Zoom out a little more, and my belief is that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously - all of them are happening at the same time, all the time. If we were higher-dimensional beings we'd be able to see past, present and future at once rather than moving along a line from one to the other, same as a one-dimensional creature can only see what's right in front of its face (its "future"), whereas as 3-dimensional beings we can see the entire line it's travelling along (every "event" in its life) simultaneously. It doesn't know where the line ends or what's at the end of it, but we do!
Doesn't leave much room for the usual conception of free will, but there ya go...