Mindfulness and the naive realism of feeling you are experiencing things 'now;.

"You can never actually experience the now," says the Physicist friend of mine.

"But hold on,  I have a first personal perspective;  you know I am typing this out and I am experiencing it now. "

"Yes, I understand why you feel you are in the now and it is true of all our states, whatever we experience, we feel we are experiencing it 'now'.

 The  only problem with that feeling that you are in the ‘now’ is that it a ‘naive realism’. The feeling that you are in existing in the ‘now’ is as if you are anchored by a temporal internality that presumes it is a ‘now’. But this is a false feeling, a specious sentiment. Let me outline my argument against the 'now'.

The argument against the feeling of now goes as follows::

(1) What we perceive, we perceive as present.

(2) But what we are perceiving is motion, In fact, it seems odd to say that we see, hear or touch time passing. And indeed, even if all our senses were prevented from functioning for a while, we could still notice the passing of time through the changing pattern of our thought

Indeed, given the finite speed of the transmission of both light and sound (and the finite speed of transmission of information from receptors to brain), it seems that we only ever perceive what is past, although we perceive the past, we do not perceive it as past, but as present, as the ‘now’

 "But I have a first person perspective, you know I am typing this out and I am experiencing it now. "

"Without exception, it is true of all one's states that whatever I experience, one  feels one is experience it now.The  only problem with that feeling that you are in the ‘now’ is that it a ‘naive realism’." 

"So all this 'Oprah' hooey and the phenomenon of million selling books on 'keeping in the now with mindfulness' are just nonsense?"

"Yes, pure nonsense scientifically but useful nonsense for many."

 

Peter Cheevers' short stories are published by Ether Books

http://catalog.etherbooks.com/Authors/1118  

PUBLISHED NAME	TITLE
	Not Even A Recall – Where’s That Revolver?
	Violence in Chichester? No, Never
	I Never Saw A Woman Look So Wistfully
	A Night On The Moon
	All Flesh Is Grass
	No Atheists In Foxholes
	The Rats' Somme

published by Ether Books, download  on Kindle 

Peter P. Cheevers' PhD available 

at: 

http://www.worldcat.org/title/subject-and-its-performance/oclc/500328126