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What is the nature of existence? When something exists, does it exist for all time, or do things come and go? Or does only the present exist. To quote Wheeler, "The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present." But what is the present? When is now? Is now an incoherent concept? Is now May 27th 2012 when I am writing this? Or is now May 28th 2012 when someone else is reading this? Or 2040 when someone is reading this in an archive? If now is an incoherent concept, how is Wheeler's statement different from "The present has no existence except as it is recorded in the future."?

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Are you asking about the nature of time on modern theories? If so it's probably a good idea to clarify the question otherwise I suspect it will be closed. – John Rennie May 27 '12 at 10:27
Please restrict yourself to positivisitically meaningful questions. This means, formulate your question as a question about sense experience, "if I do this what happens", or a sequence of things that can be reduced to sense-experience. What you have asked is not a question, but a string of words with no real meaning which fool the brain into thinking they have meaning. I will vote to close for this reason, as it is annoying to answer "this question is meaningless" for every meaningless question. The only response is "think as you like, the answer is whatever you want it to be". – Ron Maimon May 27 '12 at 10:30
This question cannot be answered because you have not defined "existence." – WIMP May 27 '12 at 11:32
$\Longrightarrow$ Ontology – Nick Kidman May 27 '12 at 12:40
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closed as off topic by Ron Maimon, dmckee May 27 '12 at 14:55

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