| If the past and future did not exist then there would be no chain of causality. Without past and future, I would never be able to make it to the next word in this sentence because what lies before this exact letter is the past and what lies after this exact letter is the future.
The "present" is only the smallest fraction of an instant. I think I would have a more successful time arguing that the "present" doesn't exist. It could be argued that every action a human takes and every piece of sensory input we receive take place in the past.
The computer I am looking at right now does not actually exist in the present. There is a lag time for the light to bounce off it, hit my eyes, and be interpreted by my brain. There is a lag time as my fingers touch it, register resistance, and move over its keyboard. That lag time means that the object I am interacting with in what I perceive as the "present" actually only exists in the past and all of my actions that interact with the object are also occurring in the past.
The past sets the precedent for the future. The present, if it can even be said to exist, suffers from being infinitely divisible so why bother attempting to live in such an infinitesimal speck of time when you have the limitless fields of precedent and possibility on either side of it? |