[Serious] Is the Past Real?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Past is as real as its effects on the present.    You can consider it to be unreal if you don’t care for insight into the present it offers through effects on the present you can deduce but as yet not directly observe.   You can also consider it unreal if you don’t care to deduced what a future born of the present should look based on what the present born of the past actually looks like.

It’s simply the gnome-in-the-garden problem from another angle:

There is a ceramic gnome in my garden. Possible explanations for its presence include 1) I placed it there, 2) someone else placed it there, 3) it has always been there, 4) it is a self-creating gnome that reestablishes itself instant by instant, 5) and so on. Which of these explanations is ‘real’ doesn’t alter the presence of the gnome.

It doesn’t matter.

Boru