There Is No Such Thing as the Present Moment

from Marcelo Gleiser:
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"Now" is not only a cognitive illusion but also a mathematical trick, related to how we define space and time quantitatively. One way of seeing this is to recognize that the notion of "present," as sandwiched between past and future, is simply a useful hoax. After all, if the present is a moment in time without duration, it can’t exist. What does exist is the recent memory of the immediate past and the expectation of the near future. We link past and future through the conceptual notion of a present, of "now." But all that we have is the accumulated memory of the past-- stored in biological or various recording devices-- and the expectation of the future.
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More excerpts from the book, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning by Marcelo Gleiser, Basic Books, The Perseus Books Group, 2014 can be read here.