Past, present, and future

Posted by ESC on June 11, 2003

In Reply to: Past, present, and future posted by TS on June 11, 2003

: Recently I have been troubled with a definition and I don't know if I may ask it here. I have a difficulty to define past, present, and future. As you see, 'Today' is a present time, but within today there is some past hour and some future hour. It follows that past and future are part of the present time. It doesn't make sense, so it troubles me. May you give a point?

Well..."the present" is the block of time that you are now experiencing. For the rest, there are degrees. The past, the recent past, the distant past, the near future, the distant future. You might see what Merriam-Webster has to say about it.

A Stephen King character, a Wolf/man creature from another dimension calls the present "right here and now." Or something like that.

I have a nine-year-old friend who, his mother says, doesn't like for her to use words like "yesterday" or "tomorrow." He wants her, for example, to say "Monday" instead of yesterday. She worries about him. But he's interested in science and I'm thinking he wants days of the week because that's more precise.