Usually, we content ourselves in saying that the past “did exist,” that something “was” in the past, and the future “will exist.” But that’s actually tricky—what do “did”/”was” and “will” actually mean? Are they special classes of existence? Are they like somewhere in between existence and non-existence? We think as if their meaning is clear, but if you really think about it, “did exist” and “will exist” boil down to nothing more than the grammatical conventions we use exclusively in reference to the past and future, respectively, so they really tell us nothing, and it’s not clear what other kinds of “exists” there could be or if that’s even logical.

So it would seem more sensical to assume that the past and future either don’t exist in any sense, and effectively never “did” or “will,” or that they still and already do exist “somewhere.” There’s no way even in principle to measure or observe the past or future, because any measurement must be done in the present, hence whatever it measures can only be a part of the present. Everything we know about the past is a mere deduction from what we know about the present. For example, we know about dinosaurs because their bones exist in the present. We know about WWII because of the various documents, war planes, stories passed down to the present generation, etc. that exist in the present. All our memories of the past, including what happened 5 seconds ago, apparently exist as neurological patterns in our brains.

Similarly, everything we know about the future is obviously merely an expectation or anticipation in our imagination deduced from what we know of the past and present (where “the past” is nothing more than an aspect of the present).

You could even argue that assuming a past or future therefore violates Occam’s razor, which is the principle that the theory that explains the phenomenon in question while introducing the fewest necessary (or unnecessary) external elements is the most likely correct one. (Occam’s razor makes sense if you consider that each element has a certain probability of existing, and the probability of all of them existing, which would be necessary for the theory to be correct, is the product of each individual probability, which diminishes with the number of probabilities being multiplied.) But it’s not clear whether the assumption of a past violates Occam’s razor, because what would it mean to explain the present if you can’t appeal to past states as a cause? The assumption of a future, though, may more clearly violate Occam’s razor.

So there is somewhat more reason to think that the past exists than that the future does: if the past “didn’t” (i.e., doesn’t, somewhere/somehow) exist, then why does the present exist as it does, with all of the indications of a causal history—for example, our bodies, all other plants’ and animals’ bodies, their fossils, etc. that seem to indicate a long-running process of biological evolution?

Though there is some reason to assume that the future “will exist” (i.e., does somewhere/somehow exist): we experience the “now” as ever moving from past times to more future times (or at least our memory, which exists in the present, tells us that), or in other words, we experience the past as ever-unfolding into the future (at least all the way back as far as we can remember). Therefore, it makes sense to assume that the “now” marker “will” (whatever that means) continually “move” from the past to the present to the future, or that the now “will” unfold into the future, which “will” then be the current state of existence.

As another answerer went into, the relativity of “now” in the general theory of relativity (which has been verified in every observation we’ve ever made to test it, and is currently used in practical technology such as GPS) seems to indicate that a “block universe” in which past, present and future always-already exist is the only logical possibility. “Now” would therefore be an illusion, perhaps one that’s useful for the purposes of survival and such as driven by the forces of biological evolution.

Though it raises the question, if all of time already exists, why is there any coherence between past and future in accordance with the principles of causality (which is what makes biological evolution even a thing) at all?

But I guess you could make the same argument for a universe in which the past really does continually unfold into the future, as in, why doesn’t it do so completely chaotically? David Hume showed that there’s no logical necessity for the principles of causality, i.e., why one event should follow another, in other words, we can’t prove that some event “should” follow some other event or, ultimately, why it does.

But it’s worth considering that if there were no causal coherence between the past and the future, there’d be no basis for the perception of time to begin with (nor even any organisms that could perceive it), and therefore it’s arguable whether time would actually even exist. Time seems to be an emergent property of the laws of physics; for example, some scientists believe that there was no initial moment of the universe, even though the universe didn’t extend infinitely into the past (as according to the big bang), because at the big bang, causality/fundamental mechanics worked such that time “curved around” in the same way that the curvature of the earth means that you can walk forever straight across the surface of the earth without ever actually leaving the diameter of the earth.

As another example, there’s a theory that once the heat death of the universe sets in approximately a googol years from now and the universe is completely homogenous, it’ll be functionally the same as the singularity at the beginning of the big bang, and the universe will start over again, at least from a certain perspective (and really, nothing ever has any meaning independently of any perspective—there is no such thing as a “view from nowhere”). This is supposedly fully consistent with known physical theory, and it’s something I’d personally strongly suspected even before I’d heard of the theory.

In his books, Julian Barbour gives an interesting explanation of how the illusion of now and of the progression of time could emerge from a universe in which the past, present and future all always-already exist.

I personally think that the randomness of quantum mechanics might be what allows for an actual gradual progression of time, because of reality were deterministic, then future states would amount to nothing more than a mathematical transformation of past states (and probably vice versa), and therefore there would be nothing to stop time from progressing from the initial moment of the universe to the last moment all in an instant, thereby making any experience of the gradual flow of time impossible. I envision quantum mechanics to entail a kind of ongoing “dissonance” between the past and future. This would seem to imply that there’s a lot more to the “random events” of quantum mechanics than there appears to be. I wrote a little bit more about the significance of random events under the third bullet point of my essay https://philosophy.inhahe.com/2016/12/13/notes-on-free-will/.

It’s astounding how much money and effort companies put into the various means of advertising, such as collecting tons of personal data and using AI for targeted ads, and just the sheer number of commercials they show and all the productions they sponsor, just trying to get people to buy their products. This indicates a vast inefficiency in consumption, in that the profit margins are high enough for them to afford all of that, and also high enough to motivate them so much to try to sell more things. And the profit margins are also responsible for the extreme wealth imbalance, and the measures they go to sell products are responsible for consumer culture.

And there’s so much pressure on efficacy in advertising that advertisers routinely resort to unethical means of psychological manipulation to achieve their goals. The machinations of advertising get worse and worse over time, because it starts out with natural innocence and morality, and then every now and then an advertiser introduces a new machination to the mix, and everyone copies it, stooping to their level, and becomes the new norm. A little bit more innocence is lost, each time.

But things are still extremely innocent in comparison to what’s to come. It’s almost quaint what we have now. There’s so much money to be made in consumption and commerce that it’s inevitable that they’ll find ways around the relatively innocent paradigm of having to cajole us into buying their products and services, being essentially powerless over our decisions. They’ll short-circuit the process so that there’s no longer the gap of our free will between their desires and our actions, or in other words our money, and/or possibly even our labor.

The way they’ll do this is by buying out politicians in order to effect legislation that will force us to purchase certain products and/or services. The more time passes, the more products and/or services we’ll have to pay for. Large corporations are already in bed with the government, and as their wealth increases, partly as a result of their influence over government, they’re more and more enabled to influence government legislation, which in turn increases their profits, etc. etc. It’s a vicious cycle. So, eventually they’ll have enough power to do away with our rights to choose how we spend our money.

And don’t assume they wouldn’t be so brazen; if you know anything about the history of large corporations, you’ll know that they’re completely without scruples and will do anything and everything to maximize the bottom dollar. The only thing between them and the most diabolical acts of evil is government regulation and other legal protections. Everything ostensibly good or wholesome they do, they do for the sake of public relations and image.

The only reason I’m explaining all this that we must do something now to stop it, to nip it in the bud. What exactly it is that we have to do, I don’t know. Somehow, we have to get corporations out of bed with the government. I suppose the only way to do this is to vote in honest politicians, and maybe then to lobby for, or also vote in people who support, more stringent government regulations, reversals of certain laws that better enable corporations to influence the government, new laws that prevent the various ways corporations buy out politicians, illegalization of paid lobbying, campaign reform to stop donations from wealthy people and corporations from being a factor in who wins elections, etc. Stopping voter suppression laws and gerrymandering, and not to mention doing away with the electoral college, would also help.

One problem with voting in honest, good politicians, at least/especially presidents, is that they’re always the underdogs, so even people who would want them in office don’t vote them for fear of wasting their vote; they vote for who’s most desirable out of those that have a chance to win, so it becomes a vicious cycle: to some degree, people don’t vote for the underdog because they’re the underdog, and they’re the underdog because people don’t vote for them.

The only way I can see to remedy this problem is to create and popularize a system, most likely a website, whereby people can promise to vote for a given candidate, if and only if N number of other people also promise to vote for them. That would defeat the vicious cycle of the underdog.

Even this system is problematic, though, because people can’t agree in a sense of “if N number of other people don’t promise vote for candidate X, I promise to vote for candidate Y instead if N number of other people promise vote for them,” and so on, in a way that allows for optimal selection of a final candidate that reflects people’s actual preferences. I’m not sure exactly how the optimal system would work. Perhaps everyone could do ranked choice voting, then the system could select a final candidate for everyone to promise to vote for using the Condorcet method or something.

This would effectively act as a solid replacement for the state’s dismally inferior voting system, to the degree that people actually use it.

If I remember correctly, the existence of mirror neurons is highly contested in the scientific community. But the idea, which is based on certain observations, is that there are neurons in one’s brain whose function is to mimic the behavior of neurons in another.

Basically, researchers found that, in monkeys, certain neurons associated with making certain facial features or with picking up food were fired when they were looking at a monkey making those facial features or picking up food. So, they called these neurons “mirror neurons.”

The funny thing is, though, that if certain neuron firings correspond with feeling certain ways, then of course those neurons would fire when a monkey makes a facial expression, and of course they would fire when another monkey witnesses them, just due to the phenomenon of empathy.

That is, for example, monkey A feels sad, sadness-related neurons fire, and monkey A makes facial expression B. Monkey C sees monkey A’s facial expression and then feels sad, so the corresponding neurons fire in monkey A’s brain. Naturally, they’re the same neurons that monkey C would normally fire when making the same facial expression, because that facial expression corresponds with sadness.

The same logic could be applied in the case of picking up food: monkey C sees monkey A picking up food, and he empathizes with the feeling of eating or having his hunger quenched. Well, monkey A also felt that feeling, obviously, and that feeling could very well have been what caused the neurons to fire that correspond to subsequent neurons firing in the brain of monkey C.

So, what we’re witnessing here is simply empathy, or at least theory of mind, at work; but scientists, in their typical naively reductionistic approach, focus on the neurons themselves that correspondingly fire and call them “mirror neurons,” as if the correspondence in their firing is a blind, simple, and mechanical function of those particular neurons themselves.

In my opinion, there’s a lot to be learned from this. There’s a lesson here: What else might scientists get wrong in their reductionistic naivety?

Recently, a friend of mine asked me why people believe in the Holy Bible or religions in general. Here’s my response.

The main reason is that they were indoctrinated to think it’s the word of God and that they should believe every word of it and follow it, from an early age, by their parents and the church their parents took them to. It’s passed down from generation to generation that way. Children are very conditionable, and something like this that they learn from an early age, they’re unlikely to ever change their minds about. Hence, they pass the same ideology down to their own children due to its perceived crucial importance.

But there are other reasons, I think. Christianity is a meme complex, as in it’s “designed” to take strong hold of the host’s mind and impel it to spread the complex of ideas. I’m not clear on many of the aspects of that, but I have a few ideas…

1. It says if you believe, you go to heaven for eternity, the best possible place to be, for the longest possible amount of time. It describes heaven as an environment with all the things that people would typically desire to live in.

2. It says if you disbelieve, you go to hell for eternity, the worst possible place to be, for the longest possible amount of time. It describes hell in nearly the most tormentive terms imaginable.

How convenient are these two points for a meme complex? You can’t get any simpler, more direct, or more absolute/superlative than that when it comes to components of an effective meme complex. It not only serves as a stronghold in the individual’s head, but i think it’s the main impetus in Christianity for people to want to spread it, including spreading it by passing it down to their children via direct indoctrination and indoctrination by the churches they’re forced to go to, trying to spread the “good word” from door to door, and going on missions to foreign lands to convert other peoples to Christianity. Maybe it’s a main impetus to spread Christianity via war and conquering, too, but I feel that’s probably more about other factors. You don’t really murder and subvert people because you’re concerned about their welfare.

3. It says that people or arguments that try to change your mind, including arguments based on reason and logic, are products of the devil trying to trick you. This helps insulate the host from changing their minds.

4. The story of Jesus dying horribly to save us is a very powerful, archetypal, heart-wrenching idea. It’s also a very beautiful story and an exemplar for nobleness. And would you want to just throw away His alleged sacrifice?

5. Some of the teachings in the bible—I think pretty much its core teachings—are about how to be a good person, so people grow to associate being Christian with the self-perception of them being good. This creates an extremely strong bond between the ego and belief in the religion.

Beliefs about things that particularly matter to people are already strongly tied with the ego, which is probably why you can seldom change anyone’s mind about anything, but this is an exceptionally strong bond due to its effect on the most important aspect of self-perception.

6. The decrees of the religion reflect popular morality (specifically, the popular morality at the place and time it was invented, but some of those morals remain attractive to this day), so people like it because it validates their moral precepts and values. Some such decrees are that homosexuality is a sin, that women should be subdued in such and such a manner, and that we have “dominion” over every living thing on the Earth, which allows us to exploit the other animals for our purposes without guilt.

7. It promises a personal connection to a higher power, a father figure. Or, you could say it co-opts our connection to actual divinity, which is a bit different from Christian divinity in that it’s inseparable from ourselves, is 100% non-judgmental, and isn’t leveraged by praying to it asking for it to do things per se—it doesn’t work that way.

8. It’s a crude form of, or shadow of, spirituality, or you could say it co-opts our connection to or apprehension of the spiritual; e.g., it lets us know that we’re more than just meat-bags. It also allows the comfort of knowing that death is not the end (though it’s not very comfortable to think that our loved ones who are not Christians will burn in hell forever), but this could be considered to be a restating of part of point #1. It also provides some information about a universal/cosmic spiritual context, which provides the illusion of understanding the world. The reason it’s an illusion is that the information is fallacious, extremely simplistic, and quite absolutist.

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Some of these things are Christianity-specific—other religions probably have other memetic aspects—but the “indoctrination at an early age” and “passing down from generation to generation” thing probably applies to a lot of religions. Another, related reason for people believing in religions is the degree to which their respective cultures are immersed in the given religion.

One thing worth noting is that, when a Christian believes the Bible is true, it’s not really about the contents of the Bible per se. Most of them don’t even know most of what’s in the bible. It’s just the idea that the bible is true that’s part of—what should I call it—”folk Christianity” maybe; that is, the aspect of Christianity as it actually exists in people’s minds and culture, as opposed to what’s in the literal Bible.

There seems to be a considerable distinction between “folk Christianity”—or maybe I should say “cultural Christianity”—and the contents of the actual Bible. As evidence, I could point to (1) how much Christianity has changed over time, and (2) the existence of various denominations of Christianity, some of which are very different from each other—different enough that there has been historical animosity between some denominations.

Christianity overemphasizes the importance of some parts of the Bible (such as “homosexuality is a sin,” which is only mentioned in the Bible a couple of times), completely ignores some parts (such as slavery and not eating Crustaceans—see https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/areasontosmile/2011/11/dear-dr-laura-why-cant-i-own-a-canadian.html), and arbitrarily interprets some parts. There are also some pretty prominent tenets of Christianity that are merely the products of mistranslations of the original writings.