Page 15 - Boundedness Revisited

Second, it is incorrect that the present exists, while the past and
future do not: the reverse is true. One can understand this by
answering a simple question: how long is the present? It cannot be
zero. For every observer, what is retained and processed in the
brain as immediately happening is a finite but species-variant time
slice. This is evident from the retinal retention of images humans
manifest; the illusion of cinema depends upon it. But if “the
present” in fact has temporal duration and is yet another
arbitrarily-bounded event in an organism’s nervous system, then
we must conclude that the contiguous and continuous past and
future are real and the present is a fiction. Again, a useful illusion;
but, again, not logically supportable if one accepts the principle of
boundedness. Parmenides has been decried as denying the
possibility of change (and therefore freedom of action) in a “block
universe.” That is a mistaken criticism: without a fifth dimension
from which to observe swaths of past and future simultaneously,
our fate is not to know the future and to forget the past—all the
while imagining we can escape the unbounded reality
encompassing both. Why our experience involves an illusion of
absolute movement is not a question philosophy can answer; it is
properly in the realms of physics (entropy, perhaps) and biology
(evolution, certainly). Science should resolve it—without violating
the principle of boundedness.

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