Free will and temporal becoming: SMM/DTT and Panpsychism and cosmopsychism

01The question behind the comparison

A world that becomes is not automatically a world containing free agents. New outcomes may be random, mechanically determined, responsive to reasons, or imposed from elsewhere. SMM/DTT’s emphasis on completion can illuminate when an action becomes a settled event, but freedom concerns how that event relates to the agent’s capacities, deliberation and control. The philosophical task is to explain agency within a source-generated world without erasing the difference between the person’s action and a merely external occurrence.

Determinism and fatalism are also different. A deterministic process can include deliberation as a cause of what happens. Fatalism would make the outcome unavoidable regardless of relevant deliberation or action. Introducing indeterminism does not by itself improve control: an unpredictable coin flip is not an exercise of will. A source-based theory can therefore explore a reasons-responsive form of agency even if its update law is deterministic. A stronger libertarian proposal would need to explain how alternatives remain genuinely open and how their resolution belongs to the agent.

The six nested inner levels should not be treated as six hidden decisions made by a small inner person. That would reproduce the problem inside the model. Their useful role would be to organize capacities such as memory, evaluation and action selection in a physically or conceptually explicit way. These are illustrative functions, not established identities of the six DTT levels. Outer completion could mark when an action yields a stable public consequence. The model would still need to explain how the agent’s own organization participates in that completion.

02The single-source and nested-time proposal

SMM begins with one nonspatial generative source. DTT distinguishes its inner production from the outer order in which completed results become accessible. The six inner levels are nested functional dependencies within that production; the seventh denotes outer completion. They are not six independent clocks, six spatial directions, or six simultaneously occupied temporal axes. This distinction makes the framework more specific than a general claim that everything changes: it asks how a world of persistent relations can be generated before its spatial representation is taken for granted. ^[2]

03The comparator’s explanatory structure

Panpsychist approaches make experiential or protoexperiential properties fundamental and widespread. Cosmopsychism gives priority to a cosmic experiential whole. These positions face different explanatory directions: combining many experiences into one subject and accounting for distinct subjects within an experiential whole. Shani’s cosmopsychism offers an original philosophical treatment of the second route.

SMM’s one source is structurally closer to a top-down dependence than to a collection of independent micro-subjects, but a nonspatial generative source is not automatically a cosmic consciousness. The additional experiential claim must be stated. A useful example is a shared database accessed through separate permissions: one information source can support several perspectives, yet nothing about permissions alone establishes that those perspectives feel like anything. A source theory needs both individuation and an account of experience. Cosmopsychism can sharpen that task, while DTT contributes an explicit interest in how differentiated access and temporal histories are generated. ^[1]

04The precise agreement and difference

Cosmopsychism raises a distinctive agency problem: if local minds depend on one experiential whole, in what sense are their actions their own? SMM/DTT faces a related question about local agents generated by one source. The common issue is not merely determinism; it is attribution of control within a hierarchy of dependence. A whole can sustain a local process without making every description of the local agent redundant.

DTT’s record histories and differentiated access can help identify the organization that deliberates, learns and acts. The further cosmopsychist claim is that this organization belongs to a distinct experiential perspective. A theory should then explain how the person’s reasons make a difference while remaining grounded in the source. If every local decision is replaced by the will of one cosmic subject, ordinary distinctions among deliberation, coercion and accident become difficult to preserve. The comparison therefore gives SMM a constructive challenge: derive locally coherent control relations and then state how they relate to the wider unity. Temporal becoming supplies a setting for action, not an automatic proof of freedom. ^[1]

05Worked example: what follows and what does not

An agent chooses between helping a neighbor and continuing a private task. Suppose better information about the neighbor’s need would change the choice, while coercion would undermine it. A reasons-responsive account regards these counterfactual differences as evidence of agency. Now replace the decision by a random switch with the same observed outcome. The event remains unpredictable, but the relation to the agent’s reasons has vanished. This example shows why temporal openness and agency are separate. A DTT model of becoming can provide the setting for action, yet a theory of freedom must identify the relevant control relations within that setting.

06What this comparison contributes

The constructive opportunity is to distinguish source dependence from the absence of local agency. An organism may be wholly dependent on its underlying physical and metaphysical conditions while still acting through its own organized capacities. Whether that suffices for freedom is a philosophical disagreement worth stating explicitly. DTT becomes clearer when it specifies which account it supports, rather than presenting a new temporal vocabulary as a resolution of every debate about responsibility.

THE SAME QUESTION, DIFFERENT STARTING POINTS

The comparison at a glance

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