Just to add more reasons why the more you learn about science the less joy it brings to your life because it shatters the foundations that make that possible, mostly with sensation:
This shows how unreliable our senses are citing optical illusions as well as how our memories can alter perception.
This argues that thought as you know it isn’t real and all decisions are made without your knowledge.
This is about how the brain interprets weak stimuli to mean anything really.
This further explains the lag of our senses:
Along with this follow up answer from another user also demonstrating further doubt in the senses:
"In terms of video games, similar models are used but usually called other names like “latency compensation.” A simple example is predicting the momentum of another player on your machine, while waiting for the real (always past) data from the server. An easy algorithm for this particular prediction is to just draw a straight line from the player’s last known past position (authoritatively given by the server to your client machine) that aligns with their last calculated velocity. Everything in this calculation is from the past. And it’s unlikely players are moving in perfectly straight lines. But if you just approximate it that way anyway, and then update frequently enough by snapping the player back to where they actually were when you finally receive the new, updated, but again past, data, then it will look pretty good. Human vision goes beyond just predicting always straight lines of course. We predict other worldlines too, by looking for patterns. This is why so many optical illusions can create the sense of motion without it being there. That’s your brain trying to guess where something is going and sometimes it gets duped by well-designed optical illusions that hack this. At any rate, you predictively hallucinate then update, rinse and repeat, over and over. Those predictive hallucinations are always based on the past, and since they take a window of time to compute, and in the case of quantities over time like momentum, are additionally always Uncertain, fundamentally, because they are defined over windows of time, you end up being wrong a lot. But the impact is constrained by how frequently you update. You may have noticed that sometimes you are sharper than other times, and your ability to predict physics is sometimes really accurate and snappy, and other times broken and groggy. That’s your update system working fast, or not working fast,
These systems are far from perfect and so is ours. We perceive things incorrectly a lot of the time but just like a video game, we update constantly and often tend to forget we just saw something wrong unless it actually catches our attention. This is why for instance you may think you read a word on a sign only to do a double take and realize that word isn’t there. Yet it seemed like you saw that word. But of course, when you do that double take, the word is corrected in your “hallucination” of reality. You might notice something like that especially if the word you hallucinated was a cuss word or something crazy. But this is happening all day, all the time. And you don’t notice it usually because your brain just fixes it and moves on and it wasn’t noticeable.
Sometimes, you might be doing a tricky physical maneuver, say surfing, or skating, and something goes wrong, and you’re very confused about it because you could have sworn you saw something different before it happened to what actually happened. That would be an example of your brain experiencing lag and that lag being big enough compared to the speed needed to precisely pull of the maneuver. This is why fast hand eye coordination is difficult. Practice helps because practice helps you build up those predictive circuits by training on data sets.
The question as posed was focused on “present” vs. “past,” however. The problem with that is of course that there is no such thing as “the present” really, and “the past” is more of an abstract notion related to the order of causal events. It’s popular to say “there is only the present,” and the “past is an illusion. But really, it’s more like “there are only events which you now experience as the past due to the arrow of time, aka. the causal ordering.” The present is a predictive “hallucination” based on patterns extracted from past memories, and then constantly corrected via feedback. So in a sense, people have it exactly wrong. The past is closer to being the “real” thing than the present is, in terms of how consciousness actually works.
But that’s only if you take a solipsistic brain-centered view of the universe. Their point is that somehow the universe exists outside of your point of view, and so that you see only the past at all is just a limitation of yours, supposedly.
But that doesn’t work either because they are assuming local realism, which doesn’t seem to be right. Everything that exists, from your frame of reference, exists only because it is somehow entangled with you. The information you receive from everything in the universe that is entangled with you is the only reality that we can say “exists.” But to be entangled with consciousness takes time. It’s not like there is an infinitesimal slice of time that consciousness takes place in every “moment.” No. It’s an inherently smudged out property, taking always an interval of time due to the pipelining of work done by your meat computer. That window of time isn’t just a delay for no reason or a delay purely for travel time of thoughts. There’s that too. But it’s mainly delay caused by the fact that consciousness itself takes time because it’s a computation.
So you only ever experience the past and predict the future. The cut off, which again is not a precise “moment” of time but a small smudged out window of time, is the delay it takes your consciousness to process your experience. So the “present” can be thought of as that smudged out window of time that straddles the past memories and the future predictions, but it’s not exactly clear where one ends and the other begins. You might be able to notice your lag, somewhat, during meditation, but it’s not because you are eliminating the lag of your consciousness altogether. That doesn’t even make sense and is contradictory. It’s just that you’re experiencing a lower latency in one part of your brain, which is then monitoring other parts of your brain. So you notice that difference, but don’t be fooled into thinking you’ve beat latency. You’ve just got two latencies that are different, and the difference between them isn’t the total lag. You simply cannot escape lag.
The Uncertainty Principle strikes again."
And, last but not least, further driving the point home about how everything we experience has already happened in that we live in the past, almost like what we are seeing isn’t real, we don’t live in the now:
Like…you don’t really have anything to offer to make the case that learning more about the world makes life better. That simply isn’t born out. Most people don’t know about all this so they can live happy lives, but once they do it opens the gates to doubt so much more.
Not to mention my quote before about emotions and how you don’t genuinely feel anything because it’s all social programming, you feel that way because society says you ought to not because that’s how you feel for real.
It’s learning science and thinking it makes the world interesting is fine when you’re a kid, but that’s because they don’t know how deep it goes and how much you lose in the process. The list of discoveries that destroy wonder and meaning goes on. Just google Constructed Theory of Emotions.
