sábado, 9 de maio de 2015

The past is now.


Street in Kyoto, by GomJabbar

   So, remember that post I wrote about having weird feeling of nostalgia, as if everything I was currently living was already in the past? Today I woke up with a similar idea. But first, let me warn you, i will use the words "living" and "past" quite a lot.
    "The future is now" is a great slogan for a tech company. I can't remember which one, though, but i think you've probably heard it once or twice. Maybe it was Samsung or apple or something, I don't know. Anyway, this morning I somehow got to the (probably inaccurate) conclusion that the past is now.
    I may be just an idiot with a lot of imagination, but think about it, we will never live in the future, because that is a concept in our head which is always ahead of us. And I'm not talking about the weird feeling we get whenever we get in touch with some very high-tech devices (like me, when I first got to use the Motorola Xoom back in 2012 - man, that thing was awesome!), but the actual and literal future. Next year is the future right now, a mere concept in my head, an imagination, a prediction, something I've never experienced. And when I start living it, it won't be the future anymore, thus, I will never live in the future.
    However, we live in the past, since everything we are experiencing right now will always be in the past. All that is happening today and all that you're currently thinking will be in the past, a memory for the future you to remember. That bring us an interesting question: 

What if we're living in the memories of our future self?

But wait, come on, we're obviously not, right? Right? I mean, how could our future self remember everything with so much detail? Well, Freud showed us that our brain saves a lot more than what we  think in our unconscious, although most of it is unaccessible. And the thing is, if we are indeed living in the memories of our future self, then who knows what his mind is capable of compared to ours? Also, studies have shown that more than 50% (or was it 30... Maybe 70 - it was a lot, okay?) are in fact generated by our brain, that is, the more you remember something, the less accurate this memory becomes. So we might remember things that haven't even happened! And that leads us to a second, scarier question:

What if most of what we live isn't actually real?

Are a lot of things we see and feel just creation of our future self's mind? Or is all of it fake, and we're not part of his memory, but instead part of his imagination? So are we responsible for our own actions?  Or is all that randomness just another way of reaching the same, old conclusion: I think therefore I am?

Oh, screw it. My head is just too tired to think about this nonsense.