'[...]“how long is the present?” is not a question we understand, for it is asked outside of any context, and that therefore, “a vanishing instant” is not an answer we understand either.There is no “real” present, any more than there is a “real” context: the entire symphony, its first movement, the movement’s 100th measure, are on equal standing, as are the presents associated with the performance of them.' —Yuval Dolev [1]
In this blog post, I am going to discuss the philosophical topic of the thickness of the present—that is, how long our experience of what is happening now lasts, and how long now lasts. I will save for a follow-up the discussion of this topic's implications for poker, in general, and its use for dealing with variance in poker, more specifically. Right now, let us focus wholly on the philosophical idea.
Whenever we ponder about the passage of time, we do it from the perspective of our present experience of it. We can focus on what is happening now, and distinguish this from events that have already passed, which we can remember and can no longer influence, as well as event that haven't happened yet, and that we are yet to possibly experience, influence or bring about in the near or more distant future. Some of the events that we are experiencing now, as we are experiencing them, still are in the process of unfolding. Those processes, and our involvement in them, either as observers or as actors, have a duration; they don't occur in an instant.
When temporally extended human experiences happen, such as listening to Beethoven's Pastoral symphony, what we experience in the moment is conditioned by what happened before and and by our expectation of what is to come. Music usually has a narrative structure and just like the experience of reading a novel can't be what it is without the memory of what was read in earlier chapters, or without the expectation of what will be read in subsequent chapters, music can't either have the same aesthetic and emotional impact that it has, in the present moment, without the stage setting that occurred when listening to the beginning of the piece (or remembering it) or without the expectation and anticipation of what must follow and is yet to be heard.
Thinking about the temporal experience of listening to music, or of reading a novel, can be misleading, though, if we think of the perceptual process as something that takes place wholly during the very short duration of a "present moment" and if we think of this momentary "present moment" of experience as being merely externally constrained by the past through the exercise of short term memory and by the imaginative anticipation of a future experience that has not yet occurred.
In order to understand why it is misleading to think of our present experiences in this way, consider a useful analogy to the question "What is the duration of now?" The analogical question is: "What is the spatial extension of here?" Just like the English words "now", "here" is an indexical expression. It designates the place where the person who makes use of it is located at the time when she make use of it. Likewise, the word "now" designates the moment in time when the person makes use of that word to make reference to this moment. I would therefore argue that, just like it makes no sense to try to restrict the location of here to a single unextended point in space, it makes no sense either to pinpoint the time of now to an instantaneous moment in time. The reason is similar. The reason why here can refer in different contexts to our seating position in a theater, to the room we are in, to the city we are visiting, to the badminton court where we are playing, and so on, is because we are embodied creatures who inhabit the space around us and, since our bodies take space, and our activities take even more space, what is being referred to with the word here is the place where our bodily selves are located and where they are busying themselves in various activities. Likewise, the activities we are engaged in, and our conscious apprehension of them, take time.
There may appear to be a disanalogy between the two cases, though. While we can hardly make sense of the idea of pinpointing the location of here to a place that is much smaller than our own bodies, there does not appear to exist a principled limit to the shrinking of the present moments that we can consciously attend to. Consider the sequence of questions and answers that we might provide to someone who is texting us from a remote location:
Where are you?
I'm in Montreal.
Where in Montreal?
At the Salle Wilfrid Pelletier
Where are you seated?
Seat DD7 on the parterre
It would not make much sense for our distant interlocutor to ask us to pinpoint our location much more precisely than that. Contrast this with a different sequence of questions regarding now.
What are you doing?
I'm vacationing in Montreal until next month
What are you doing tonight?
I'm attending to a performance of Beethoven's 6th symphony
What part of it is currently being performed?
Currently, it's the second movement: Scene by the Brook
Clearly the dialogue need not stop there. Within our experience of listening to this movement, there is our experience of listening to successive musical phrases, themes or melodies; within each phrase, there is our experience of listening to successive chords and notes. When a chord or note is held for some significant duration, we can also attend to variations in dynamics and timbre, the beginning of a string vibrato, etc. What we can attend to as the auditory experience that is occurring now indeed seems to shrink to an unextended albeit moving present instant.
However, as I had suggested earlier, music pieces having a narrative structure (as well as melodic, harmonic, thematic and other formal structures) are, like many other human experiences and activities, composed of moments that gain their meaning from the surrounding context and hence can't be separated from such structures. The manner in which an individual momentary note or chord are heard very much depend on their harmonic functions and their places in the whole work, and something similar can be said for structures at all the temporal scales: The last movement of the symphony, labelled by Beethoven "Shepherd's song. Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm", wouldn't be heard the same way if it were removed from the context of the whole symphony, which includes, of course, the previous movement that depicts vividly the sound and mood of the storm itself.
So, I would like to suggest, just like the depiction of here as a fairly precise location (e.g. being seated at the BB7 parterre seat) is no more uniquely representative of the real here than are the spatially wider locations (Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, Montreal, etc.) where our extended stretches of activity take place, likewise, the depiction of what we are hearing, experiencing, or doing now also is context dependent and can encompass the hearing of a musical theme, of a symphonic movement, or, indeed, of a whole symphony. In this manner, I want to say that the present moment, which we designate with the word now, not only is temporally extended rather than instantaneous, but its thickness is context dependent and hence relative to whatever wider context of experience gives meaning to the very many moments of shorter duration that make up this experience or activity.
My argument isn't complete though. In order to spell it out more fully and make it more plausible, it will prove useful to mention the main source of the intuition that the objective flow of time can be understood as the movement of an instantaneous present moment that represents a moving cutting edge between the growing past and the shrinking future. Although this intuition finds its source in the scientific view of the world, physicists themselves have warned that it is misleading. So, comparing and contrasting the (allegedly objective) scientific view of time with the experienced or lived view of time will be our task in the second part of this post.
[1] Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives, The MIT Press, 2007
[2] Robert Efron, "The Duration of the Present", Interdisciplinary Perspective of Time, Volume 138, Issue 2, February 1967
[3] Martijn Wallage, "Living in the Present", Philosophy, Volume 95, Issue 3, July 2020, pp. 285-307
[4] Lewis S. Ford, "The Duration of the Present", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 100-106, September 1974
[5] Britany A. Gentry, "Measuring the present: What is the duration of ‘now’?" Synthese, Volume 198, pp. 9357–9371, 2021
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