Are the Past, Present, and Future an Illusion?

Three thought experiments about why what you know just ain’t so

“Time is a flat circle.” Whether uttered by Matthew McConaughey as Rusty on True Detective or explained by Nietschze and Camus, the shape of time has often intrigued philosophers. Is time an arrow that travels unerringly forward? One basic idea from physics is: to figure out which direction time is flowing, look to where things become more disordered (or more entropic — see the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

Or is it the flat circle, also known as the theory of eternal return? This view holds that all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue infinitely. Think the scene with the Architect in Matrix Reloaded or Bare Naked Ladies’ It’s All Been Done Before.

Either way, we have to confront the three dimensions of time as we experience it: the past, present, and future. Superficially, these seem similar, as the future flows into the present, and then becomes the past. A closer look though shows that there is something eerie going on here though. Let’s think about the Past and the Future first.

What is the Past?

The past is simply all the events that transpired before the current moment. Pretty simple, right? However, where is this past exactly? Can you revisit it anywhere outside of your mind? Remembering the past is metaphorically like playing back a film in your mind. If you think deeper though, when exactly is this film playing? The present! There is no real past.

This “past” is really a construct of the present. Your current mood, desires, and situation all shape the story you tell yourself. The movies Memento, 500 Days of Summer and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind both do a good job of showing a protagonist whose mental constructions of the past are slightly (or greatly) flawed. Their present circumstances lead them to selectively create a past to rationalize their present. There is no real past.

But what about our records of history? Don’t they faithfully record past events, giving us a “God’s eye” view of what occurred? Historians may beg to differ. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss once recounted primary research he was conducting on Lyndon B. Johnson. Known for his colorful language, the Texan also was a prodigious legislator. Even better for a historian, he had a recording device in the Oval Office, which gave an intimate look at the deliberations the President undertook on a daily basis. These had been subsequently transcribed.

Beschloss recalled one nondescript day where LBJ ended one meeting, and then told his secretary to send the next “pack o’ bastards” in. This struck Beschloss as odd, even for LBJ. Why disparage a group he had not even met with yet? Beschloss requested and was granted permission to listen to the original recordings to see if he could gather any clues. As the audio played, Beschloss could make out LBJ’s Texan drawl asking his secretary to send in… the Pakistani ambassador! The supposedly historical record just wasn’t so. There is no real past.

What is the Future?

The future is certainly not observable. Can it even be predicted though? Philosophers have debated the question of whether what occurs to us is chance or fate. I give the edge to chance but perhaps the answer is a blend. Maybe the major turning points of our lives are predictable but how we get there is up to chance.

Still, a thought experiment might help. Think about your future self 10 years from now. What will be the same in your life? Different? Now, think about how confident you are in this prediction. I imagine most people are pretty confident but not certain.

Now, think back the other ways. What would you have predicted 10 years ago your life would be like now? What did you get right? What is different? For most people, the journey was likely much different than they imagined.

Psychologists have termed this phenomenon the end of history illusion. The idea, promoted by psychologist and author Dan Gilbert, borrows from the title of historian Francis Fukuyama’s book with a similar title. Presumably, we have as good knowledge about our inner states, and yet fail to make reliable predictions about ourselves. If we cannot predict ourselves, can there be some objective future out there for us to find? Or is it more likely that it is all made up as we go along?

More likely, our sense of the future is our projection of the present. Our current hopes and dreams shape what we think will be, rather than a sober assessment of what might actually occur. The future remains fundamentally unpredictable. There is no real future.

What is the Present?

Having no past and no future, we are left with the present. By a process of elimination, this must be the only reality we have, right? However, what if even what we think of as the present is an illusion?

Perhaps a construct is a better idea. Two quick experiments you can perform on yourself right now can demonstrate this idea to yourself. First, close your left eye. Then extend your right arm and stick your right thumb directly in front of your line of sight. Now keep your focus the same and slowly arc your arm outwards.

About 6–10 degrees out (your arm will be just past your shoulder), notice something funny? Your thumb tip disappears! Keep swinging outwards and it comes back. Move your arm back in and again, your thumb is partly missing.

What is going on here? You just found your blind spot, literally! Imagine the eyeball as a projector, with the world projected onto the retina through the pupil. However, unlike a movie screen, the wiring for this system comes in through the screen, where the optic nerve enters the retina. This spot creates a gap in your field of view. But why don’t we see a hole there? Our brain tricks us by averaging the input around the blind spot to fill it in. Also, with both eyes open, the information from this blind spot is captured by the other eye.

But wait, when exactly does this ‘filling in’ occur? Isn’t what we see right now what is happening right now? Let’s try a second experiment to verify this. Touch your toe.

Yep, that’s it. Everything happened as expected right? You saw yourself touching your toe, your toe felt your finger, and your finger felt your toe. How long does all this take though? Assume that signals travel along neurons at 1 m/s, and that your toe is approximately 2 meters from your brain, your finger 1 meter, and your eye 0.1 m. Also assume that the time light takes to travel from your toe to your eye is essentially 0. Doing the math, if you touch your toe at time 0, then you should see it 0.1 seconds later, feel it in your finger 1 second later, and then feel it in your toe 2 seconds later. But this doesn’t happen!

What is going on? Your brain must clearly be buffering all of this info, synthesizing it, and then presenting it to you as occurring simultaneously and instantaneously. But the moment your finger touches your toe is not actually occurring when you feel it — it happened up to two seconds ago! You are living in the past, constantly. There is no real present.

We are left with a paradox. If the past and present are constructs of our mind, and the future, a projection, what are we left with? Or rather, when?

Before we get any more metaphysical, my main takeaway from this is to focus on the present. Ruminating on the past or daydreaming about the future is really stealing from the present, which is all we have.

There is no time like the present to be present.

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