Proof - We Don't Exist

The past and the future do not exist. The past did exist but no longer does. The future will exist, but doesn’t yet. Only the present moment exists. The present is an infinitely thin filament of time between the past and the future. The present is the only “time” that actually does exist. The present is the time frame that we exist in. Right?

There is a paradox though, because we don’t think or move in the present. We think in the past, which doesn’t exist.

Imagine the pilot of a CIA drone airplane. He sits in a control room with sensor read outs and video camera screens. The drone is thousands of miles away. The drone has sensors and cameras that transmit information to the control room where the control room computer receives the incoming data, then interprets the data and then outputs the data; only after all of that does the pilot interpret the readouts (of the data that occurred in the past) and make his flight adjustments.

There is always a time lag between the sensor in the drone receiving data and then transmitting the data to the control room, the control room interpreting and outputting the data, and the readouts providing the information to the pilot. The time lag can be quite long, depending on circumstances. The pilot is always behind the actual present moment that the drone exists in, due to the transmission/interpretation time required. In essence the pilot is always flying the drone in the past and never in the present.

Human consciousness is exactly the same. All data received by the brain is transmitted along neural pathways to the brain. The brain receives the signals and then determines which signals to allow through to the consciousness and then interprets the neural signals based on past experiences before presenting the data to the consciousness. By the time the consciousness is aware of the signal, the moment of the actual signal’s having been generated has passed. The human consciousness is just like the drone pilot, sitting in a remote location, reading interpreted signals that required time to arrive and process.

The consciousness of each individual is not only separated from reality by its body’s mechanical/electrical/chemical systems, it is also operating strictly on past data.

So, there is the paradox, the human consciousness exists in the past and the past simply doesn’t exist.

Think about this the next time you are in a conversation, be aware that the voice you are hearing isn’t in the present. The person speaking says something, the sound is transmitted as vibration waves passing through the atmosphere, the vibrations go into your ear canal and vibrate your ear drum, the ear drum vibrates small bones, the nerves in and around those bones pick up the signal and transmit electrical signals along an electrical conduit, the electrical pulse eventually arrives in some portion of the brain where it is releases a series of electrical impulses.

Those impulses release chemical messengers that travel to chemical receptors then some magic happens that causes your consciousness to recognize the pattern of the signal as a voice with a specific modulation, then the brain also decodes the signal into a syllable attached to another syllable.

These syllables are combined and then sent into the memory section of the brain where the brain compares the combined sound pattern with millions of previously experienced sound patterns, after millions of comparisons the brain makes a match and determines that this pattern is recognizable as a specific word, then the brain searches the memory for all instances of the uses of that specific word and determines what the word’s definition is.

But wait there’s more because now the brain also compares the many uses of that word to the specific clues surrounding it for context and meaning in this particular instance. Only after all of this is accomplished does the brain present this to the consciousness. By the time the consciousness has the information the word has been spoken in the past.

Now go back to paying attention to the conversation as if none of this matters. Since we don't exist, none of this does matter, right?