The present and the becoming of the world: SMM/DTT and McTaggart’s A-series and B-series

01The question behind the comparison

The present can mean an ontologically privileged reality, the event at which an observer is located, or the interval integrated into current experience. These meanings often overlap in ordinary speech but play different roles in a theory. SMM/DTT places outer completion at the transition between generative activity and accessible actuality. Its distinctive possibility is to explain the present through the constitution of records rather than take a moving instant as primitive. Whether this yields a universal present or only local completed events remains a further question.

A becoming theory must explain both novelty and continuity. If each completion is entirely independent, the world lacks inherited structure. If every completion is simply the unveiling of a fully fixed history, the theory may be closer to a block interpretation than its language suggests. DTT can articulate an intermediate construction in which lawful retained memory constrains new completions without making earlier physical tokens persist unchanged. The present would then be a dynamically sustained interface between inherited relations and newly accessible events. The proposal gains content through its memory rule.

The six inner levels belong within that interface. They are not six past moments traversed before reaching a seventh ordinary moment. Nesting expresses how the capacities required for a completed observable world depend on one another. A reader should therefore distinguish a symbolic diagram of completion from a physical claim about how long the present lasts. Neither the duration of conscious experience nor the resolution of an atomic clock follows from the number of nested roles. Those quantities require separate models of observers and physical clocks.

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

McTaggart distinguished tensed positions—past, present and future—from the relations earlier than and later than. His argument challenges the coherence of taking passage as a changing possession of incompatible temporal properties. For the comparison here, the distinction is a tool for asking what DTT’s completion adds to an ordered history. A sequence can be fully ordered without specifying which member is now present.

Consider a list of event labels A, B and C. The facts A precedes B and B precedes C do not change when a reader moves down the list. What changes is the reader’s relation to a particular entry. If a completion theory adds an objective change in actuality, it needs to say whether that change is another event, an irreducible feature of events, or a change in a meta-time. These alternatives expose the regress question without assuming that McTaggart’s conclusion is correct. His analysis is philosophical; it supplies no Hamiltonian, physical clock or information-processing mechanism. ^[1]

04The precise agreement and difference

McTaggart’s challenge is sharpest when the present is treated as a property that moves from event to event. DTT can offer a different formulation: a present is the completion through which a previously unavailable relation becomes accessible. This gives presentness a functional role, but it does not automatically settle whether the change in accessibility is an objective becoming or a tenseless relation within a history.

The important distinction is between a record’s existence and an observer’s knowledge of it. If DTT identifies the present solely with current knowledge, it risks making the world’s becoming observer-relative in an unintended way. If completion is objective, the theory needs a criterion independent of a person noticing the result. McTaggart’s categories help articulate this choice. The constructive DTT contribution is a completion relation that determines which records can constrain later events. Its philosophical interpretation can then explain whether that relation supplies an irreducible present or merely the structure through which finite observers experience one. Both questions deserve explicit answers. ^[1]

05Worked example: what follows and what does not

Imagine a ledger that records a sequence of transactions. At stage n it contains a stable history and a pending transaction whose validity depends on that history. At stage n+1 the transaction is accepted and can constrain later entries. The ledger’s current accepted state is a precise analogue of a completion boundary. Yet the analogy leaves open whether the future ledger already exists, whether old physical pages remain, and whether acceptance takes a definite duration. These are additional ontological or physical commitments. The example shows both the appeal and the limitation of identifying the present with completed accessibility.

06What this comparison contributes

The comparison becomes productive when it asks what a present does in the theory. Does it select what exists, what can cause later records, or what an observer can currently know? DTT has an unusually direct route to the second and third questions because completion and retention are central to its vocabulary. A successful account of the first would require a coherent ontology of uncompleted possibilities and of the past. This division allows philosophical ambition and operational precision to reinforce one another.

THE SAME QUESTION, DIFFERENT STARTING POINTS

The comparison at a glance

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