[Serious] Is the Past Real?

[HappySkeptic]

Personally, I ponder the nature of time often and yet I really don't have a firm position. My symathies lie with presentism because I feel the past is truly gone and to the extent it exists it is in presents ghosts. Then as time goes on those ghosts fade while the set of possible paths that could have led to this moment increases. Then I think, certainly there is the way things actually happened so in some sense the past exists in some immutable way...from a god's eye view so to speak...regardless of whether from an objective reality (i.e. there are past objects) or an Akashic record.

Anyways, I was just curious what others thought about time.

From a practical point-of-view, humans live in the present.  Our perception of the present is actually the "past" few seconds, owing to our neurology.

From a physics point-of-view, there is a link between past, present and future.  That link is always past-toward-future for local events (causality), but this gets confusing when one considers the entire universe.  The The Wheeler–DeWitt equation for the wavefunction of the universe does not contain a time variable.  Einstein's relativity leads to the idea of future and past for far-away events being determined by ones reference frame.

From a mystical point-of-view, I consider past, present, and future to be all of equal "value". 

My argument is that most will agree that the events of the present have "value".  We assign moral or experiential good-or-bad to the present moment.  This "value" of experience may be shared (a community experience) or it may be solitary (or a good or bad event witnessed only by you).

The present doesn't actually exist for any period of time - it is seen in an echo of the past.  If the present has any value, it must continue to have value when the events are in the past.

The future is the present-to-come, and for those present-to-come events to have value, the future must have value.

Therefore, I consider all events, communal or private, as experienced by sentient beings anywhere in the universe, anywhere in time, to have value.  When bad things happen to others, we should be witnesses to it.  When good things happen to anyone we should rejoice.  We should learn from the past and work toward a better future.  And, as always, we must treasure the current moment.