What is "present" time? By the time one even considers the present it is past, is it a virtual state?A fake?

Question

Are we therefore virtual beings, existing in between two more reasonable states of time, that equal nothing, but are only stories and hopes of our minds? A virtual state of time between two virtual states of time?

Answer 1

The present is always. every moment either once was the present or will be the present.

Answer 2

Thinking takes time. At any point in the process, there's a present, but it may not be the present that you're thinking of. The damned subjectivists, the ones who talk of personal "truth" and personal "worlds" without explaining that they're metaphors, confuse themselves, not only the victims of their teaching. This "virtual" crap is overblown. Virtual is just another way of saying "a pretty close fake or copy"
___Don't get bamboozled by dogmatism. The world doesn't need to abide by the requirements for our understanding of it, for it to exist on its own. It's perfectly capable of eluding our understanding. In the Middle Ages and early modern times, some philosophers proposed ontological proofs of God's existence, which relied on the assumption that God's existence had to conform to necessities of human conceiving. A lot of what passes for philosophy today is the same thing, minus God.
___Look, events happen in the world, and we have pretty good grounds for believing that they do, even if we our descriptions of them aren't perfectly accurate. Past events are determined, and future ones are not. If your cat craps on the sofa, it'll stay there until someone cleans it up. Things get a little weird at quantum scale, but they mostly cancel out at the scale of ordinary-sized objects, and we live in a pretty stable and determinate world at our scale.
___It helps to think of time as a way of distinguishing events that have occurred from those that haven't, and both from those that are occurring.
___Just because our conceptions of time are inadequate, there's no reason to conclude that something like temporality isn't happening. You could say that, strictly speaking, the thing that is supposed to exactly correspond to the human concept of "time" doesn't exist, but that's just wordplay, intellectual masturbation. My concept of the space shuttle is vague and inaccurate, but I'm not going to get all mystical wondering if all those shuttle flights were merely virtual space travel. (I have played with the navigation computer from the Apollo 11 trip, though. A 4k processor!)
___You can believe that your experience of the world is at least analogously true. Remember, a good whack to the side of your head with a 2x4 will disable your capacity to doubt the 2x4's existence. Don't believe all the dogma you hear, no matter how intellectually hip it is. ARRGHH!

Answer 3

Time is a convenient conceptual invention. It does not exist but is an excellent frame of reference for neatly dicing and organizing events. Whether you parse time in nanosecond or in decades or millenniums, it does not change the event it is referencing...it happened.

Virtual state, virtual being...sorry, my level of understanding not that sophisticated. I leave these to people smarter than me...like you guys and ladies.

Answer 4

I agree with you. Time can't really be measured becuase it does not have references of its beginning or ending. Many people beleive that time can be owned or lost, wasted or gained. Those ownership ideas come with the concepts of time actually being "two virtual states". I disagree, and think time ever flows. Mybe thats why the original Sun Diles were cycles, like stone hendge. The circle had and still continues to have no two pointa of reference of its beginning or end, it flows continuosly. Mybe time was originally a spiritual concept. It explained something that could not be explained.

Becuase people believe in this concept of "Two virtual states",
people produce 24/7, and are in a race to make money. Its the primal normadic fear of being eaten. People still have that fear but express it in "modern" ways like feeling fearful and ensacurity of losing or wasting time. They beleive time can be owned or gained, so they slave away through all four seasons of the year, night and day, birth to death, to hopeful gain alittle more time. I think its time to change and recognize that our species is over surviving. But then again, I wouldn't want to get eaten by a lion,...would you?

I like to beleive that there are NO two virtual states of time. I feel time is misunderstood. If time is one the main things people fear, enforce, and beleive in the most, mybe if we changed our ideas on the concepts of time, we could change the state of our living, ways of thinking as humans...ect.

Who really knows,..do you know?

Answer 5

It's like driving down a one way road a 60 miles per hour. At any given time, "here" is behind you. It exists because you were there for an infintesimal point of your life, but your only true evidence that you had been there is in your rear-view mirror.

"Now" works the same way. It's a real location, but it can only be perceived historically.

Answer 6

There is nothing but now. The past and the future are just illusions. Little more than interpretations based on a memory or a guess.

Love and blessings Don

Answer 7

I have to say....well.....i know the exact answer to that but i'll have to be sure that it is correct. But I do believe it is a virtual state.

Answer 8

Time is only present when you have people to take note of it, otherwise time doesn't exist.

Answer 9

There's a theory that there is no present time.

Answer 10

when time stands still...