When we look at a scene, we are constructing an
understanding of what we see from past experience (is that a tree on the
horizon or a pylon?). We can’t look in two directions at once, we have to take
time to construct the picture (we look over here, then over there – even if we
don’t move our head, our eyes scan the scene).
Yet we perceive this as experiencing the landscape in ‘the
present’. This is sometimes called the ‘spurious present’ – “the interval of
time such that events occurring within it are experienced as present”. This is
by contrast to the ‘real present’ which is supposed to be dimensionless.
In the
diagram, the point at which the two cones meet (at the observer) is supposed to
represent the real (objective, dimensionless) present.
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