The present and the becoming of the world: SMM/DTT and Presentism and the growing-block universe

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

Presentism restricts concrete temporal existence to the present; the growing-block view includes the past and present while excluding the future. The distinction is decisive for a record-based ontology. A present record of yesterday and yesterday’s continuing existence are different claims. Broad’s treatment of becoming supplies the historical growing-block comparator; the presentist alternative sharpens what an archive does and does not establish.

Suppose a stone bears an inscription describing a vanished ceremony. A presentist can treat the inscription as a current object with a history. A growing-block theorist can additionally include the ceremony itself in reality. Both can agree about what the inscription says. The disagreement therefore cannot be settled by pointing to a stored record alone. SMM/DTT gains precision by stating whether renewal preserves past events, preserves only present traces, or uses another form of persistence. Relativity adds the separate question of how a privileged present, if proposed, relates to spatially separated events. ^[1]

04The precise agreement and difference

DTT’s becoming world is close in spirit to theories that distinguish a real present from an unreal future, but presentism and the growing block diverge over completed history. Renewal can mean that the current world carries traces of vanished configurations, or that new events join an enduring domain of actuality. The word completion is compatible with either, so a choice must be made at the ontological level.

The source architecture adds a productive question that the labels alone do not answer: what makes a pending relation a completed event? An intrinsic closure condition could provide a substantive account of actualization. A rule that simply designates the next stage present would repeat the original assumption. The six nested inner levels can be relevant if each contributes a necessary capacity to closure. The comparison thus strengthens DTT by separating a mechanism of becoming from an assertion about what exists. It also highlights the need to reconcile any privileged present with the local and frame-dependent temporal relations measured in the outer world. ^[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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