The Specious Present

no, you can't ever really see it

you can only ever perceive it

　

as it passes

every moment is reconstruction

from reflection into perception

every single living moment

is never ever truly present

each and every single moment

is only always ever reconstruction

from reflection to perception

there lies between a distance

between each and every mind

and the very truly present

absolute moments in our time

　

so, you can never really see it

you can only ever percieve it

and as it was

now as you are

the specious present

Reviews

[Saoirse K.]

interesting reflection on that gap in
perception of the exact moment
in which the present occurs
like an infinite chase for an eternally elusive moment
like graphing a limit
ever approaching that present value
but never reaching it
fascinating
great title
nice write

[Davidgeo]

I always love it when philosophy and physics come together.

Thanks for stopping by.

[Kendall]

This is profound. Awesome.

[Davidgeo]

That's high praise... thank you.

[Terra]

That is the harsh reality. As soon as the moment arrives, it is gone. We never truly can be in the moment, only in anticipation or reflection. A very eye opening piece. I truly enjoyed it.

[Davidgeo]

I'm glad you enjoyed it. It's an interesting concept in any venue.

[gram linski]

Liked your poem, David we are all nano seconds behind our perception of reality, upside down and filtered by our brain, sanitized, if you believe Einstein's 4D space/time then everything happens simultaneously, which is a head f**k in its'self

[Chris Shaw]

Each second lived becomes history. That leaves very little time for the present. You live in the future or the past. Perhaps there is no present. You got my mind wandering with these words David.

Chris

[Davidgeo]

I think there really is a present... but it's not what we think it is and not something we can directly experience. If we break time down into very small quantities, reality becomes quite bizarre the smaller those quantities become. Time and it's relationship to our concious reality in particular starts to imply very weird things.

Light itself takes time to travel and everything we perceive is really just light bouncing off matter into our eyes that gets processed by our nervous system/brain into images that we make sense of and eventually call reality. Because consciousness itself is a process, every moment of reality interpreted as the "present" is not really the present... if only by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a microsecond everything we "perceive" as the present is actually the past by definition. It is not possible for a concious being to directly experience the present... the act of being concious inherently prohibits it. When scale is reversed and massive amounts of time and distance are factored in the strange nature of this fact becomes more obvious... like how we are seeing the light from stars as they were millions, sometimes billions of years ago, some of which don't even exist anymore. Even our sun, we are seeing light emitted from it's surface about 8 minutes ago. And taken to the furthest known extreme, the cosmic microwave background radiation (about 14ish billion years ago)... in that we are seeing the "light" from a time when there were no stars or even matter as we know it, when everything was just a giant ball of energy expanding and slowing cooling into the universe as we know it today. Sometimes I think "time" is an emergent property of pure energy converting into matter... sometimes I think pure energy converting into matter is an emergent property of "time". Either way, consciousness is now an emergent property of whatever is really going on but we will probably never be able to know what is really going on... as long as we have to think we'll always be just a step behind the absolute pure and unequivocal reality of the present.

[Wild Rose]

Specious Present
I take it to be a specific instant in time
A fraction of a second
No less then that - a fraction of a fraction

Time integrated too small to perceive
Only their as it happens

[Davidgeo]

More or less, I think you get the gist of it.

What I specifically wanted to convey is that our perception of the "now" is never really the absolute Now. It always takes an amount of time to perceive reality with our eyes, brain, etc. so our "present" is not really The Present and never really can be to any concious being.