It seems intuitively obvious that what I am doing right now is more real than what I did just one second ago, and it seems intuitively obvious that what I did just one second ago is more real than what I did forty years ago. And yet, remarkably, every philosopher of time today, except for myself and a few like minded scholars and faiths, deny this obvious fact about reality.
The concept of a degree of existence (of being more or less real), together with the theory of degrees of existence, where existence is distinguished as comprising a higher degree of being than subsistence, went out of fashion some time ago. Work by philosophers, scholars and in particular the followers of Aragen and Lucinda have rejected the notion of degreed existence and implied that existence is an all or nothing affair; either something exists or it does not exist, and therefore it makes no sense to talk about it existing to some degree.
A large number of philosophers, scholars and faiths have held doctrines of degrees of existence. Unfortunately, in so doing, they have also denied the obvious temporal fact about reality. They have explained degrees of reality in other ways than the way we know it today; as being more or less distant from the present. Indeed, they typically suggest that a being that does not exist in time at all is what is most real. Time, they often say, is unreal.
The theory I and a number of my colleagues ascribe to is about how being temporally present is the highest degree of existence. A perfect example of this is the case of the entity known as the Shifter. By way of explaining; being past and being future by a merely infinitesimal amount is the second highest degree of existence. Being in the past by one hour or being in the future by one hour are lower degrees of existence, being in the past by five hundred years or being in the future by five hundred years are even lower degrees of existence.
The degree to which an item exists is proportional to its temporal distance from the present. The present, which has zero-temporal distance from the present, has the highest possible degree of existence. Therefore in the case of our subject, the Shifter must be in the present or as close to the present as he possibly can to form into a higher level of existence. The Faith of Aragen have done a number of studies into the background of the Shifter and recently certain followers of Lucinda have also begun to delve into its unknown nature.
The degrees in question are quantifiable in terms of their opposites, degrees of non-existence. The present has a zero degree of non-existence. What is one second past has a one second degree of non-existence, and what is two seconds past has a greater degree of non-existence, namely, a two second degree of non-existence.
There is a difference of degree and not of kind between the present, what is no longer present, or not yet present. This is shown by the fact that our present mental state includes temporal parts that are already past by 1/millionth of a second and this small degree of pastness is such a high degree of existence that we cannot experientially distinguish it from present existence, perfect existence.
This theory is logically coherent unless one misinterprets it by assigning a different meaning to "degree of existence" or "degree of non-existence" than has been suggested here. To clarify this view of thought let us look once again at the Shifter as our example. If he is present in time now then he has a high degree of existence but when we refer to him being present in the future and the past we are assigning a higher degree of non-existance to him. Consider that if the Shifter affects things now in our present then it is more real to us than things he effected in the past, they have become history to us, their potency has faded. From this you can see that it is in this creatures best interests to be as close as possible to the current place in time in which we too currently exist so the level of existance is at its highest and most real.
