THE PRESENT

Time in embedded in the very essence of our lives. Even our languages have evolved to take into account the pervasiveness of time. There is an extensive vocabulary to include past, present and future in our communication. Of course, we assume the arrow of time to be unidirectional. Until the black swan proves otherwise, thats acceptable. Theories say certain antiparticles are particles moving backward in time, but until they're proven (and they're far from that yet) we can assume what came before is the past and what will come after is the future. So the present then is the now, or is it?

If you're standing outside in the garden one fine morning and looking at the beautiful sunflower turning its face to the sun, you'd call it your present. But how is it the "now"? It takes eight minutes for light from the sun to reach the Earth. Some more time for it to be reflected off the said sunflower and reach your eyes. And then it takes your eyes time to send the optical signal to your brain, some time yet again for your brain to sort it out and tell you its a sunflower you're looking at. By the time all this is done, the sunflower in your brain is the sunflower as it was a split second ago. Is that still a "now"?

Okay, that was probably a bit mild. Lets take it to a whole new level. Say its a clear cloudless night. You have a telescope (lets just imagine you do for now) and you're looking up at the billions upon billions of stars sprinkled through the night sky. Light from the stars takes anywhere from 4 light years to billions of light years to reach us here at Earth. So we see the star as it was those many years ago. In some cases the star that you see now could have become a white dwarf or exploded as a brilliant super nova people on Earth could maybe admire how many ever years later (if we don't become extinct due to global warming or nuclear explosions or something of the sort). It could even be a black hole if it was massive enough initially! The star you see "now", isn't really the star "now" is it? 

THE PRESENT. Such a pervasive concept. "What are you doing now?" - common question right! Honestly, i don't even know what now is! The absolute concept of the present is this indistinguishable mass of various "pasts", so how is it not a part of time gone by? Because you see it now? But since when did the world revolve around one person? 

The logical solution would then be that there is no "THE present". There is your present and there is my present, which could consist of "current" perceptions. There "current" perceptions could then correspond to events or objects temporally separated in the "physical world". Not that this solves all the issues. For one, its a slippery slope leading to fallacious justifications for relative knowledge. I'm not saying knowledge is something concrete, i'm just saying its problematic to accept the notion of all knowledge as relative. 

And then there's the part where the "now" changes all the time. Even if change is the only constant, something that is now now is no longer now now because some finite amount of time has passed making the now now different from now then. (Inducing brain-numbness is just another hobby of mine, fyi) The entire part when the present is balanced on such a thin and rapidly shifting line just adds to the ambiguity (or maybe the ambiguity is only in my head?).

Its surprising to me, that after all the centuries and thinkers gone by, there isn't one explanation of the all to common and widely employed concept of "the present". A present=a gift, that's the only uncomplicated definition i'm aware of!