[Serious] Is the Past Real?

[tackattack]

I think your position is supported here by the fact that memory is often faulty. It's pretty well proven that what we recall has been edited and interpreted. The memory we have presently in our mind is more or less tenuously related to the event that originally prompted it.

Likewise souvenirs and artifacts. They obviously originated in the past, but their meaning and the associations they call to mind exist in the present. 

Maybe we should say we have every reason to believe that the past WAS real, when we were in the past, but it doesn't exist now. (Or rather, it doesn't exist FOR US now. If it's true that time is made in the mind, or that there is a God for whom all time exists simultaneously, then the past does exist still, but outside of our minds.)

Indeed, I am taking the temporary stance that the the past has the same ontological status as the future. That the future does not exist (yet) seems commonplace compared to the notion that the past does in some sense exist. Yet the future as what might be based on present reality seems no different from the past as what could have been based on what is presently available. So why do we think the past is real but the future is not?

Sorry for the double post. I think because part of the definition of real has to include actualization. Things in the past did happen, and now is pure actualization, but the further away from now we look into the future the less it can be actualized.