When we think of the present, we think of what is happening at the current moment in time.
Therein lies the problem. Our perception of time is directly related to two things: the speed at which our brains process information and the speed of light. I guess the speed of sound could factor in there as well.
Case in point:
The speed of light is estimated to be 186,000 miles per second. I always thought it was 126,000 but did a few Google searches; scientists must have recalculated it since my middle school days. At any rate 186,000 miles per second equals 982,080,000 feet per second.
Last I checked 982,080,000 feet per second is pretty damn fast. So fast, in fact, that our brains don’t even work fast enough to process it.
To make a long story short, put this in your pipe and smoke on it a little while.
Imagine someone is standing in front of you at a distance of ten feet. Suddenly a bee lands on their nose. The image you see is actually in the past due to, as previously mentioned, the speed at which our brains process information and the speed of light.
I did some calculations yesterday and came up with the following. Light travels so fast that it takes it only .001385807991028 seconds to travel ten feet. That’s a mere 1/134,217,728 of a second!
Therefore when you see that bee land on your friend’s nose, that bee actually landed 1/134,217,728 of a second before you even saw it. Our eyes work faster than our brains do. As we all know, it takes roughly a second or so for our brains to process the information and make us realize that a bee just landed on our friend’s nose. If you want to delve even deeper, factor in the refresh rate of our ocular system (our eyes).
Our eyes don’t work in a continuous feed. They have a refresh rate, not unlike a computer monitor. What you’re actually seeing every day is a movie, made up of countless individual images.Factor in the time it takes for our brains to process the information and the refresh rate of our eyes and you find the event actually happened further in the past than we originally calculated.
Because of my findings, I have to surmise that the present does not actually exist. Everything about our lives exists in the past. It’s just that everything we see and experience has happened at such in infinitesimally small amount of time ago, we perceive it as being in the present.
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You think too hard.
You have too much time to think.
Good thinking.
interesting. so is this your excuse for living in the past?
i'm kidding. that would explain why we as humans are so focused on what has already happened and what is to come rather than what we are 'perceiving' as in the moment.
interesting concept, makes you think about bending light to make things unnoticeable…