[Serious] Is the Past Real?

[Neo-Scholastic]

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.

[Ranjr]

If prior copulation had not occurred, I would not have an opinion on this matter.  Much of the past is real.  People's memories of the past are based on what was real, but colered with feelings, cultural filters, and the spectrum of mental health.  In those respects, the past is not real.  Even so, that unreal past, spoken by elders, takes life in our thoughts, and in doing so, becomes real. Thus, determining which is or isn't requires careful consideration. 

It's a case by case way of thinking, not an ideology to adopt.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I'm not sure whether the past is real. I AM sure that it doesn't matter whether the past is real.

Boru

[Belacqua]

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.

There are a number of different traditions (including, I think, some physicists) which say that everything exists all at once. They say that time is an artefact of how we perceive things. Time is among the mental phenomena, like color, rather than being in the noumena. 

I don't understand this at all. 

I do remember that Ernst Cassirer concludes: "We are not so much in time as time is in us." 

If this is true, then I guess it means that the past, present, and future are all equally real. That the present only seems more real to us because it is the part we are aware of most, but that this is like looking at a broad landscape through a soda straw.

[Jehanne]

I'm not sure whether the past is real. I AM sure that it doesn't matter whether the past is real.

Boru

Supernova explosions are routinely observed in distant galaxies billions of light years away. Were those stars real?

[Pat Mustard]

Yes. Next stupid question please.

[Angrboda]

Memory seems to require and encode temporal activity, transitions rather than static scenes. That seems to suggest memory depends upon a real past.

[Jehanne]

Of course, memories can be false.

[Anomalocaris]

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 have not directly observed.

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.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I'm not sure whether the past is real. I AM sure that it doesn't matter whether the past is real.

Boru

Supernova explosions are routinely observed in distant galaxies billions of light years away.  Were those stars real?

Again - it doesn’t matter.

Boru