The present does not exist of the nature of the light and our senses and brains cannot perceive without a delay it. I would like to write an essay on this subject and objectify it in artwork.
Light takes time to reach our retina. Information that reaches the retina needs time to be converted into images in our brain. Therefore, what we see is already the past.
Light travels through the air at 299,702,547[1] meters per second.
What we see is nothing more than the reflection of light from objects, people, living things, the sea, clouds, celestial bodies, etc.
It takes our brain an average of 0.00013[2] seconds to detect an image.
An image of a mountain 5 km away arrives in our brain with a delay of 0.0001467 seconds, i.e. we see the mountain 0.0001467 seconds ago, minus 0.0001467 seconds of real-time. The same for the moon is 1.28013 seconds. Therefore, we can never see reality, only the past.
If we take a photo of someone standing 5 meters away from us and there is a mountain 5km away in the background and we can see some clouds and the moon in the photo, we are actually taking a photo of, or seeing four different pasts in one moment. Our brain perceives this as being the present, but in reality, it is a simultaneous representation of several past reflections.
When we photograph these pasts and look at the photograph, the information in the photograph that represents multiple pasts shows the viewer only one past. A past is a two-dimensional representation of reflections from multiple pasts captured in a single moment in time.
Geza Csosz
[1] https://www.space.com/15830-light-speed.html
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-013-0605-z