---the present is real. I can employ all my senses to taste its reality.
---the future is real because I can go there, on condition that I wait till it becomes the present
---the past is not real, because I cannot go there. Little bits of it remain, in memory, ruins, descendants and so on. But they are not the past, they are remnants from the past. And no matter how long I wait, the past never becomes the present.
If I define reality as something I know for a fact:
---the present is real. It’s available to me for immediate cognition, without need for introspection. Not all of the present is available to me, however: only that part of it falling within the radius of my attention.
---some of the future is real, but it’s mostly empty like next year’s diary. I know the sun will rise and the moon will go through its phases. The days of the week will succeed one another. My alarm clock will sound according to its setting, assuming it works properly. My knowledge on these points is definite. But what will happen (within the radius of my attention, as stated above) is in other respects unknown, therefore unreal.
---The past is real, within the radius of my memory, the aides-mémoire at my disposal (photos etc), and sources of fact available to me (letters, history books, things which have not been changed by time)
There are other definitions of reality which we can think up and examine as above, or in other ways.
If I define reality as something whose existence can be inferred logically:
---the present is real. It doesn’t even need to be inferred logically!
---the past is real. As Bryan says, “… it did exist as a prior state of things. It's not just a fantasy dreamed up by our memories. It leaves its traces even in the present. For example, they’re tearing down the old hospital here in town. I drive by the half-demolished building. I don’t believe that this ruined structure simply arrived here ex nihilo and popped into existence in the present.” He could have confronted Creationists in the same manner and mentioned dinosaur fossils.
---the future is real. Every day we’ve anticipated a tomorrow and a tomorrow came along. The end of the world has been falsely predicted on many dates, now past, which turned out to be just like any other dates.
However, I do have a problem with inferred reality. Here are some concerns:
---logically, there was a beginning to the universe. As science elaborates the evidence and its means of analysing the evidence, it may reach a stage of certainty about the nature of the Big Bang. Does this then become part of inferred reality? (Robinson Crusoe saw a footprint in the sand, not his own. Did this logically mean that another human being had been there on that spot, recently? Yes!)
---parts of inferred reality become the exclusive domain of experts, for only they can gather the evidence and perform the logical manipulations. If therefore I subscribe to inferred reality as true reality, I am forced to accept the dictatorship of the experts, and my own experience is downgraded.
---only in the last few centuries have reliable instruments and intellectual tools to determine inferred reality been forged. If inferred reality is true reality, then it was unknown to our earlier ancestors, and remains unknown today to those who live without benefit of science and technology, or at least an education system which propagates their principles. Such people must be swimming in an ocean of ignorance and superstition, and have done so for many thousands of years. All our ancestors.
That seems fishy to me.
Continued*
So what did our ancestors do for reality? Like us, they had reality defined as a place you can go and examine things in detail. Like us they had reality defined as things we know for a fact. But I’m supposing they didn’t have much inferred reality. Even the Greeks didn’t do experiments. They speculated, often wrongly.
But one kind of reality has certainly been known to Man for as long as we have written records and scriptures: the reality of subjective experience, imaginatively interpreted. Setting aside common sense-experience, setting aside the basic emotions, we each have subtler feelings, which we may or may not be able to express. Wordsworth certainly had a go at it:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old
Or let me die!
The rainbow is real, but Wordsworth’s response to it is just as real, perhaps more so. Why do I say “perhaps more so”? Because there is a way of looking that is so direct that it doesn’t name or analyse, doesn't separate the thing seen from the feeling that one has about the thing. You might call it a child-like response to perception. Offer to a child a spoonful of what it doesn’t like, and there will be no thought of “this is food; I am hungry; my mother will not offer me poison; therefore I should open my mouth and swallow it.” There is just a compressing of the lips, or an “Ugh!”
I take this kind of reaction, to the rainbow or the spoonful of something disliked, to be a primary reality. It’s the reality of instinctual behaviour, unmediated by thought; such as you will find in a primitive animal—a slug, say. To many people, it’s virtuous to distance oneself from animal behaviour: this retreat from our evolutionary origins is particularly manifest in the main religions, which praise the migration from the material and gross to the spiritual and subtle.
More to Follow**
