Being and becoming
Ask what an account of becoming adds to a description of change, and connect present records, renewal and a complete history.
REALITY & TIME · EXISTENCE AND THE WORLD WE EXPERIENCE
Philosophical approaches to reality
Explore philosophical approaches to reality through questions connecting temporal order, change, experience, and the interpretation of reality.
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Substance and process
Follow a maintained flow through material replacement and stable observables, separating criteria of persistence from a complete ontology.
Realism and its alternatives
Reconstruct a binary grid from selected measurements, then distinguish predictive success, identifiability and belief about underlying reality.
Presentism and the reality of the present
Distinguish present existence from present access, examine truths about the past and calculate the challenge posed by relativistic simultaneity.
Eternalism and the complete history
Distinguish a complete history from determinism and universal knowledge, using simple sequences to clarify the claim of eternalism.
The growing block view of time
Compare an expanding history with presentism and eternalism, and separate an objective newest boundary from a component’s retained records.
Relational accounts of time and space
Separate event order, clock ratios and distance constraints, asking which relational structures a physical theory must supply.
Idealism and the status of experience
Read Berkeley’s account of ideas and spirits, distinguish access from existence and examine what observation can establish.
Panpsychism and neutral monism
Compare panpsychist and neutral-monist proposals, separating a common basis, mathematical combinations and claims about experience.
Possibility necessity and the laws of nature
Explore an eight-state transition graph, compare exact and cumulative reachability, and distinguish allowed paths from probabilities and physical necessity.
Explanation and metaphysical ground
Separate a cause, a constraint, a definition and a proposed ground, and ask what inner generation must constrain to become physically explanatory.
Unity and multiplicity
Distinguish senses of unity, inspect where a signal and a graph obtain their structure and ask what one source must constrain.
How philosophy and experiment inform each other
Use a crossed device-and-location comparison to show how conceptual distinctions shape experiments and how evidence limits interpretation.
Questions that remain open about time
Map questions about temporal existence, passage, clocks, records and experience to the definitions, derivations or tests they require.