Technical Report # 34

Constructing and reconstructing the past and the future in the present

Johnson, M. & Sherman, S.

Abstract

We have been thinking about time and truth--about the relations among past, present, and future, and about the extent to which our memories of the past and anticipations of the future are veridical. It seems natural to think of time in terms of three major divisions--past, present, future-- arrayed in a linear fashion in some infinite abstract space, through which we move in a single, forward direction. In this view, we may remember or forget the past and imagine or ignore the future, but both past and future are essentially beyond reach. Such a characterization, however, misses something fundamental about our relation as psychological (cognizing, feeling) beings to time. Past, present, and future are not discrete divisions among an orderly succession of life's events. Rather, past, present, and future fold backward and forward like Japanese origami. They collapse onto each other, emerge from each other, and constantly determine each other, as we construct and reconstruct both past and future in the present, and the past and future construct the present.