There are 3 choices, 4 votes for Dr Thrax's debate

What is the present?

Is there really a presennt time?


  • This came to me a while ago.

    One day, sitting in Barns & Nobles over a coffee or two, I watched the clock as my friend was talking about his end of the current philosphial veiw over weather or not language is meaningfull. I than noticed that by the time "Now" has happened, it was already over. The question seemed to be a head ache indusing one. Is there such thing as "present time"?

    Two weeks later, I found myself in an interesting cnversation over head ache inducing philosophys. The same question arose by my friend whilst I was explaining my veiws on eternaty.

    Throught all of this, I would like to say: There is no present, everything takes time to travel too and from your mind. If you are staring at your computer screen, you are staring at light that was produced a millionth of a second ago. Even though it's a short amount of time, it still has already passed before you saw it. Furthermore, when you are contemplating when "now" is, it took you mind a bilionth of a second to realize what information it was sending to itself.

    So if any one asks you what you are doing now, or tells you to focus on whats hapeneing now. It may be a good idea to tell him or her that there is no "now"

    50%  Voted for by Dr Thrax, TeChNoWC.
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  • The Present Must Exist

    Sure, ok, everything takes time to travel to and from your mind, so the things I'm seeing now have passed before they reached my mind, but it doesn't negate the fact that at a certain point in time, they existed at the same time I existed whether I was conscious of it or not. Without the present there could be no past, and if that were the case, nothing would exist at all.

    So I know everybody agrees with that, but I'm saying that "now" always exists; we are just not conscious of it until later. But just because we can't know "now" until it's passed doesn't mean "now" doesn't exist. On the contrary, it MUST exist.

    Voted for by Gate Keeper.
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  • Everything has already happened

    I see time like a pack of cards, knocked over by a godly hand so as we can see each card and work through them one by one, that means that everything has already happened so it isn't exactly "now". I think time is a way of organising things, our brains do not have the capacity to take everything in at once, we can't see the 4th dimension but because the pack of cards has been knocked over we can split it, in our heads into past, present and future. "Now" is something we have invented to help us understand the world around us and like our senses it narrows things down.

    Voted for by leakypen.
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