The past informs the being which you currently find yourself as embodying, it creates potentialities which in their actualization inform the modification of your ascertained perceptual evaluation system, the current state of which, you find yourself inhabiting in the present. The present moments content contains underneath its subjective manifestation the state of being which you find yourself in now, both of which, the content and the underlying mode, is effectively modified by what has happened inside your historical development. The structure that comprises the evaluation, judgment, and filtration of possible experiential neomatic content is modified by what has happened to us, what we have experienced, patterns recognized, habits formed, and optimality accounted for, thus, the past matters insofar as it is the necessary precondition to our present experience, and is inextricably connected to the present and the future.

As for the pasts objective existence, we can start with the indubitable subjective claim that our present moment is appearing to exist for us, and while this holds for us subjectively in regards to the present, the past holds the same connotation. While we always are fallible as to our recollection of the past, our perception and subsequent conscious experience of the present, and our projection of likely or desired futures, we can state with a high degree of certainty that at the very least what is appearing in our conscious experience, whether it be memory, sensory experience, psychological formations, or projection and imagination, are all appearing to happen. This appearance of existence is a certainty to us, whether or not it actually coincides with reality, whether or not it is an illusion, or an inaccurate description based upon human limitations of cognitive capturing of phenomena, is a question of probability, and never of certainty, whether it be of the past, or otherwise. We do not exist in indubitable certainty in the Cartesian conception of being unable to doubt our doubt, or “I think, therefore I am” but rather, thinking and its psychological correlates are appearing to exist.

Insofar as our present moment subjective experience matters to us, which, we can agree does, as long as we value a pleasurable, satisfying, meaningful experience of life, the past has meaning to us. This meaning isn’t relevant to a being that isn’t us, and we can’t extrapolate it to a universal purpose without an air of falsifiable contention, but what we can say, is that insofar as we are life, insofar as we have a value system and better or worse experiences, that the past which informs these experiences is meaningful in its modification and actual effects in mediating our conscious content and psychological state, to us, and for us.