According toacceptance, in general, we don’t know that we are present. But this is
a claim we can accept, because it is not a pre-theoretic datum that we are present. It
is a pre-theoretic datum that things are happening now, that events are presently
occurring, and so forth. But don’t confuse what this datum attributes with the
metaphysician’s notion of presentness. The ordinary notion of being present or
nowness is an indexical notion just like the ordinary notion of being here. The
metaphysician’s notion goes beyond the ordinary one: it is the notion of a special
metaphysical status that all and only those things that are now in the ordinary sense
possess. The ordinary person on the street does not have beliefs about whether she is
present in the metaphysical sense of“present,”and hence it is unsurprising that the
ordinary person does not know whether she is present. What about philosophers?
The hypothesis that we are present is not unreasonable, and there is no evidence
against this hypothesis that is not also evidence against A-theories in general. So if we
are to accept an A-theory, we might as well believe that we are present, even if we do
not know that we are.
I do not accept acceptance. Acceptance is inconsistent with one of the main
motivations for the A-theory, namely, the widespread belief that the present moment
in the ordinary sense is metaphysically special. Without this grounding in ordinary
thought, it is hard to see what else should drive one to be an A-theorist. Perhaps it is
simply a metaphysical insight had by a select few? Possible, but improbable.
There is an important question though, namely, why this metaphysical belief is so
widespread among ordinary people. If this widespread belief is ultimately based on
illusion, then a scientific exploration of the psychological mechanisms that give
rise to it is an important, albeit depressing, task. If the widespread belief is true,
then an exploration of how it is that one comes to have it is also important: it is
hard to see how such a belief could be widespread unless we are sensitive in some
way to presentness. This is exactly what the proponent of the phenomenological
response suggests.
Recall that the phenomenological motivation for ontological pluralism is that
some modes of being can be presented to us, and that this is revealed by a careful
examination and description of our experiences in the broadest sense of“experience.”
Perhaps a careful examination of our experience reveals that presentness is in some
way revealed to us, where presentness is not construed simply as a property that some
things have and other things lack, but rather as a mode of being. On this response,
my merely past counterpart doesnothave the same evidence that he is present
that I have.
We need to be careful how we state the phenomenological response. It is not that
some objects look present and others don’t in the ordinary sense of“look”; we don’t
have visual impressions of presentness, for example.^63 Rather,allobjects presented to
(^63) As suggested by Skow (2009) and criticized by Cameron (2015: 34–6).