OK I'll try and have a stab at answering the original question.philosophically. .. do I think the past and future are real?... no, I don't think I do. From the point of view of determinism any time t just seems to basically represent a theoretical global state of the universe, so in that ongoing process of physical change (of that global state), only the current state is real, a past state was real, and a future state will be real and like all the other states, is inevitable.
I know there may problems with this view, from a modern physics and quantum physics point of view (about which I'm way out of my depth)... that hard determinism may not a tenable worldview any more, but it is nonetheless how I conceive of the universe at present, and frankly how I am most comfortable conceiving of it (hence my avatar... which still speaks to me as much now as it did when I first applied it)... even Einstein had difficulty letting it go I think, so I'm not the only one
But anyway, regardless of whether I think the past and future are physically real, I still think that, like I said before, we have some sort of psychological/emotional obligation to it, if not a rational/philosophically grounded one... ie for instance to honour the dead. But separating the psychological aspect of this from the logical, I suspect will prove to be... fuzzy.
I know there may problems with this view, from a modern physics and quantum physics point of view (about which I'm way out of my depth)... that hard determinism may not a tenable worldview any more, but it is nonetheless how I conceive of the universe at present, and frankly how I am most comfortable conceiving of it (hence my avatar... which still speaks to me as much now as it did when I first applied it)... even Einstein had difficulty letting it go I think, so I'm not the only one
But anyway, regardless of whether I think the past and future are physically real, I still think that, like I said before, we have some sort of psychological/emotional obligation to it, if not a rational/philosophically grounded one... ie for instance to honour the dead. But separating the psychological aspect of this from the logical, I suspect will prove to be... fuzzy.
