Jack asked:

I have a 'trick question' that I would actually sincerely like you to comment on, and perhaps change
my mind about: 'Where does all the "time" past go to, and where is all the "time" to come stored? If
we "feel" "time" passing, in which direction is it going?

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There are two questions you can raise about the past. The first concerns the alleged 'flow' of time,
and the difference between past, present and future. Not all contemporary philosophers writing on the
nature of time are agreed that the difference between past, present and future marks a real distinction
in the nature of things. Hugh Mellor in book Real Time(and his recent Real Time II- both books are
published by Cambridge) argues that time is fully captured by the 'before-and-after' series of historical
events. The terms 'past', 'present' and 'future' or the differences between tenses are explained as
marking temporal relations between the event of an utterance or assertion and the event described in
the assertion.

The seminal text to read is the argument against the reality of time by the metaphysician John
McTaggart in The Nature of Existence(Cambridge) Vol II Ch. 33.

My own view is that the difference between past, present and future is real and not merely apparent,
so I am in disagreement with Mellor, and also with McTaggart. I would reject your question, 'Where is
time stored?' on the grounds that it presupposes that the past must somehow exist in, or alongside
the present.

However, there is a second question one can raise about time which I find equally puzzling. This
concerns the nature of past facts, or what it is that makes statements about the past true. Many
events pass us by without a trace, or leaving only ambiguous and sketchy evidence from which they
could be reconstructed. What makes it true, for example (if it is true) that my car used up more petrol
today than it did yesterday, given that I did roughly equal mileage? There is no possible way of
knowing, yet we feel that the answer 'must be there' in the past. However, in the absence of God or a
recording angel, what would it mean to say that the answer is 'there in the past'?

An important article dealing with this problem is Michael Dummett's 'The Reality of the Past', reprinted
in his collection of papers Truth and Other Enigmas(Duckworth).

Once again, I do not think that it is helpful to imagine that the past must be stored somewhere, in
order to make statements about the past to be true or false.
Geoffrey Klempner