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Copied here from blog thread as useful clarification. IMO.
Georgina Parry replied on Aug. 2, 2011 @ 23:57 GMT
Dear Eckard,
thank you for your reply. I do not entirely agree with Einstein that there is no distinction between past, present, and future. I hope I can clearly explain both how I agree with him and disagree. I think he believed his space-time construct to be existentially real and not just a model of perception via the interception and processing of data from the environment. He thought that it is all concretely out there, past, present and future preordained, unchanging, forever.In my previous post on this thread I have set out my opinion on that matter.
On my essay thread I have put a number of versions of a diagram showing how I veiw the organization of reality. There is both a concretely real reality and an image space-time reality formed by the observer from received data. It shows that the past does not exist as a concrete reality it only exists within records including memories. These records are a part of the object reality, the concretely real stuff but is not the past itself. The future does not exist as a concrete -object- reality. There is only potential and probability of becoming within the arrangement of the Object Universe. Therefore there is only one existential time which I am calling uni-temporal Now. It would correlate to the tip of every light cone, where potential sensory data is produced, the causality front. But not only there because the data produced persists in the environment, so many light cone cross sections might be imagined co-existing within the one time, representing different stages of development or spread of em data.
The data persisting in the uni-temporal environment permits reconstruction of images of events -that have already occurred- (and so might be considered-the past-)such as the images of the stars. The present(-now) is an image reality currently experienced by the observer. The product of brain activity processing received data. There is also data within the environment from events that have occurred that might have already been observed in a present-now by a near observer and are yet to become the present-now of a distant observer.That might be considered -the future- for the distant observer. So in -that- regard past, present and future all are formed from the data existing within the environment that is and so are not different. It is all just data and its designation of past, present and future only depends upon how it is regarded. It is all there so there is no point like border between present and future within experienced space-time. However there is in Object reality because only the one time, uni-temporal Now exists. There is no future only a causality front when/where the sequential iterations of the Object Universe are formed. There is no concrete past. There is only the one time in Object reality.