The Plane of Existence

If something happened in the past it is too late for you to witness it. Nothing can make that happen. But even though you weren't there you can know that it actually happened. How? We appeal to several different kinds of evidence to justify claims that we know something happened in the past: documents, for example, produced at the time and still around now that refer to it; evidence of other things having happened that couldn't have without this happening; the testimony of people who were there and are still here. All the evidence is here, now, otherwise we couldn't get it. The past is the assertion of the conclusion of an argument that something happened made in the present based on evidence -- artifacts, witness statements and fossils, all of which are here and now– and since we make the argument here and now the past is entirely in the present. And of course the past can change if new evidence comes to light in the present. So the past is the provisional conclusion of an argument we make in the present. 

 

When something is happening right now, in the present, I need none of these procedures with pieces of evidence to convince me that something is happening. We see events in the present because we are there when they happen. We witness it, often we feel it and do it, and we might disagree even with documents that purport to describe the event. We might disagree even with other witnesses, solely on the grounds that we were there. What we witness, our experiences, are not open to argument, even if arguments from the toolbox of the historian might persuade us that something else happened. Our experiences are what happen to us in the present. Once they happened they were in the past and existed only as the report of a witness, namely me. 

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There is little similarity between experiencing something in the present and being convinced that something happened in the past. One big difference is that things, good and bad, can happen to us in the present. You can be killed in the present, never in the past. When dreams come true they come true in the present, and it is where we are born and die. The past is safely behind us, though the word "behind" makes us imagine a connection like a road between past and present. The past is just an argument, unless someone from the past is on our trail right now. Things that happen in the past can have meaning and make a story that has a chapter in the present in which good or bad things happen. But that chapter is in the present. Something in the past really exists when it inspires us to do or suffer something in the present. Otherwise the past is just argument and  unlike what goes on, that is, what we do in the present.

 

The future is, of course, a guess, a prediction, a plan. When we do an experiment we produce it's purpose. Something in the future,  realizing the purpose of the experiment, materializes here and now, in the present.  We carry out a plan. We do things in the present to make something we predict will happen in the future happen in the present. If a guess is a threadbare plan and a prediction a plan where I need do nothing, then the future is a plan, which, once carried out in the present, results in some predicted future thing appearing in the present. If the prediction that was the future doesn't materialize in the present, then it never was the future, and if it does, it is no longer the future, but the present. The future is a  a plan (guess or prediction) to make something materialize in the present.

 

So the past is an argument buffered by evidence, the present is where we can do things and things can be done to us, and the future is a plan to achieve a purpose in the present. The present does not recede into the past or come out of the future as if we were driving down a road in time. The present, where we do things just is, without moving. Past, present and future are in the present, where the other people always are.