Once you remove the concept of 'time past' and 'time future' time present is left dangling in the air rather without a tholepin with no temporal oar to act as a fulcrum for rowing  from one event to the next so to speak. I'd thought of giving 'time' another name like: "modal flux," or "modus statim" (Latin: instant mode) or some such thing mainly to encourage people to try and think about time differently.

       I know it would be a very ambitious project - to get people to think differently about time I mean - but until a couple of hundred years ago people still believed that the earth was flat. It is a very difficult thing to disabuse people of the idea of the linear chronicity of time, for the concept is part of our lives from a very early age, and the whole world is governed by clocks and dates and anniversaries and notions of 'past' events and planning for the 'future.'

     Of course, I am not crazy enough to suggest abolishing clocks and timetables and anniversaries and descriptions of completed modal fluxations as 'past' occurrences, but rather to coax people to consider substituting 'change' for 'time' in astrophysical calculations and philosophical considerations.

     Nothing would change but our apprehension of modal flux as an ever-present continuum, rather than as 'time' as a sparrow which flutters in at the front door of The Great Hall - flies over the heads of the revellers below - then exits rapidly from the rear.

From Bede's A History of the English Church and People, Chapter 13: Edwin holds a council with his chief men about accepting the Faith of Christ. [This council took place in AD 627; Bede completed his History in AD 731.]

Another of the king's chief men signified his agreement with this prudent argument, and went on to say: "Your majesty, when we compare the present life of man with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a lone sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counsellors. Inside there is a comforting fire to warm the room; outside, the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the darkness whence he came. Similarly, man appears on earth for a little while, but we know nothing of what went before this life, and what follows. Therefore if this new teaching can reveal any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it."

It seems only right that we should follow an event - but any occurrence in the cosmos - actually starts in the present moment and ends in the present moment. The happenings before the big bang occurred in the present moment - the big bang took place in the present moment - we are born in the present moment, we live in the present moment, we die in the present moment and we are buried in the present moment, you are reading this in the present moment.

     Physical phenomena have an onset and a conclusion comprising of a perfectly consistent and coherent seamless progression of presents. The so-called 'copula' word "is" [wrongly categorised as 'a verb'] exhibits, directs and informs us not about the existential fact of an entity's presence in the present, but about the nature or state of the entities existence and describes its serial modalities between the onset and conclusion of the plangent of its phenomenological existence.

      The fact that the human brain perceives and registers these events as happening after a small delay, before the brain achieves neuronal adequacy for reading and registering the incoming mark-up of the conscious sensory experience, does not mean that there is a conflict between the cortical apprehension of the exterior modal flux or is changed in any way, but rather that there is a delay of approximately 300 msec (500 msec according to Libet and 358 msec according to Churchland ) of cortical activity after the information arrives via the pathways for registration.

     The delay factor is simply a function of the modality of existence of the human entity that can be likened to the slight delay that occurs in the fly catching Dionaea muscipula plant between the fly landing on the sensory villi and the petals clenching the insect in its death grip. The slight delay factor in the cellular response of the Venus's fly-trap does not change the continuum of the modal flux, and because of the sweet sticky glutinous substance with which the villi are coated and to which the fly is stuck it has no bearing on the fate of the fly which is destined to undergo a dramatic change in its present mode of existence.

   I am quite aware that the recognition of the concept 'delay' is suggestive of 'time' moving forward rather than being an ever-present continuum. Things certainly appear to have happened in the 'past,' such as the modalities of nuclear activity in distant galaxies. The light emanating from their nuclear processes has taken millions of years to reach the eye of the human observer.

       The sound of a thunderclap five seconds after a flash of lightening tells us that the event happened five miles away from where we stand for that is how long it takes for the sound to reach our ears, but that does not mean that the present is operating on two different asynchronous levels, that they did not occur or exist at the same time or having the same period or phase, but rather that at the present moment of time when the lightening struck we were out of earshot five miles distant from the lightening strike and its accompanying sound.

     The apparent chronological difference between the nuclear activity in distant star-fields and our view of the star a million years 'later' only tells us that our mode of existence was different at that time of those events [perhaps as bubbling aphanite in some volcanic pool] and what we see are echoic resonances in the continuum of our own present modality of existence. Does a delay in the receipt of information concerning events provide evidence against 'time' as a continuum rather than our traditional view of it as having a past, present and future? No one so far has ever provided a clear definition of what 'time' is - everybody is familiar with how we have dealt with time and divided it up and measured it with clocks, but nobody has ever told us what makes it tick - if it does tick - which I believe it doesn't - because it simply doesn't exist. It appears to provide us with a method of dividing up the diurnal period and divide our lives into periods of weeks, months and years. We are able to speak of such phenomena as a person or thing being 'old' or 'young' and to refer to events as being in the 'past' or likely to happen in the 'future.'

      Our concept of time allows us to measure the speed of a car by the number of miles it travels in the space of one hour over the surface of the earth, or how long it takes for the earth to make one revolution around its nearest star - but are we really measuring 'time' or simply the rate of change in the existence of entities - in the case of the car and the earth - the positional modalities of their existence in relation to the emplacement modality of existence of the sun? The light we see from far flung stars and galaxies was generated in the present continuum and is seen by us in the present, what renders the illusion of a million year 'time-gap' is the modality of existence of the light waves that carry the photonic information to our retinas. The great delay in receiving the information from the cosmic boundaries is mirrored on a much smaller scale by the 300 msec or so delay that occurs before an event witnessed by the human eye is registered by the brain. AITist philosophy which was the first to posit the revolutionary theory that the verb "to be" is not a verb at all, but a modal indicant exhibiting the present mode of existence of the subject now extends the theory to suggest that the action described by the modal informant [the predicate] is something which is always happening in the present.

Klepsydra Waterclock

The linguistic ramifications for such a radical claim are profound for the whole verbal conjugational system of all human languages are posited on the existence of a 'past' and special forms of language with special syntactical functions have evolved to cope with non-current modalities. I suggest that 'time' is simply a concept invented by human beings as a  usefully fictional yardstick [an analogue version of the earth's journet around the sun]  to measure the changes in the states of existence of entities in the cosmos.

     The concept of 'time' and the multiplicity of clocks and time-pieces that mankind has created over the millenia to 'measure' the 'passing' of time from water clocks to sand-clocks to the intricate time pieces of the Renaissance, to the atomic clocks of the modern age are artefacts based not upon the measuring of some spurious 'time,' but upon the spatial positioning of entities, the movements of the earth in relation to other astrophysical bodies, the dispositional effects of the moon's pull on the earth's oceans and the life cycles of the human organism and the other living organisms that inhabit the earth.

    That physicists, astronomers and astrophysicists have carried on this age old tradition by admitting 'time' as a 'fourth dimension' into their calculations is a mere convenience [though an essentially useful one,] which obviates a constant retrospective referral to the overall rates of modality change in the area under investigation [looking upwards to the sky] . But the usefulness of this measurement system should not blind the philosopher to the real nature of the modal flux as a seamless continuum without past or future - an ever-present ever-changing reality and if this discovery necessitates the creation of a new philosophical terminology to discuss and describe this phenomena - so mote it be.