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Causation, Information, Identity, and Becoming
Philosophical consequences of Cosmic-Time Generative Presentism, a signal-based epistemology, and
the world rules of a literary fiction work
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OVERVIEW
This document draws out the philosophical consequences that follow when three bodies of work are
read together. The first is Cosmic-Time Generative Presentism (CTGP), an ontology of spacetime in
which only the present exists, each present state is generated by the lawful evolution of the
preceding one, and the past survives only through its consequences. The second is A Signal-Based
Epistemology, a framework holding that all access to reality is mediated by detectable signals and
constructed through processes of signal generation, detection, and interpretation. The third is a
literary fiction work whose fictional universe has world rules that turn questions about
consciousness, identity, and justice into fixed features of the setting.
The connecting theme is a set of distinctions that are easy to collapse and costly to confuse:
reality versus descriptions of reality, causal influence versus surviving information, truth versus
recoverability, causation versus prediction, and numerical identity versus informational similarity.
Keeping these apart yields a picture of the world that is neither a prewritten script nor random
improvisation.
Two qualifications govern everything that follows. First, these are philosophical consequences, not
empirical results. CTGP itself acknowledges that presentist and eternalist readings of the same
physics are observationally equivalent, so its ontology cannot be confirmed by measurement at fixed
physics; it remains empirically exposed only through its requirement that the fundamental laws be
generable from the present state. Second, conclusions drawn from the literary fiction work concern a
fictional world. They are useful as thought experiments, not as evidence about how actual persons or
minds work.
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PART I. Reality, Representation, and Knowledge
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1. Reality and information about reality are different categories
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A record of something is not the thing itself. A photograph of yesterday is not yesterday, a memory
of an event is not the event, and a spacetime diagram containing an event is not the event
occurring. CTGP builds this distinction into its formalism: its generated domain M(σ) is a formal
representation of the present world’s history, laid out as if earlier stages coexisted so that
ordinary tensed reasoning can be applied, and not a collection of past states that continue to exist
alongside the present. The signal-based epistemology makes the parallel point about knowledge: the
past is reconstructed from present signals rather than directly observed.
The general principle is that a description can be structurally faithful without being ontologically
identical to what it describes. A map can accurately describe a city without containing the city,
and a mathematical model of a physical system is a formal structure that can correspond to physical
structure without being a second physical system sitting beside it. Three things must therefore be
kept distinct:
referent ≠ representation ≠ instantiation
They can correspond without collapsing into one another.
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2. Information is relational
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Consider a rock that is photographed. There is the rock; the electromagnetic interaction that
produces the image; the physical image; the information the image encodes; the observer’s
interpretation of that information; and the proposition the observer finally forms. Calling all six
“the information” blurs fundamentally different things.
Information is better understood as a relation between a physical state and what that state makes
distinguishable or representable. This is why the same information can have many physical
instantiations: the word “HELLO” can exist as ink, voltages, sound waves, magnetic domains, pixels,
or neural activity without being identical to any one of them. It also explains a useful asymmetry.
Destroying one representation of a piece of information does not destroy the information, but
destroying every physically available encoding may make it permanently inaccessible. Truth,
representation, and accessibility are three separate matters.
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3. Knowing is not the same as having reality
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The signal-based epistemology replaces the picture “thing → knowledge” with a mediated chain:
thing → signal → detection → interpretation → knowledge
An observer does not simply possess reality. It receives some physically available information about
reality and constructs an understanding from it. Ignorance is therefore not necessarily a defect of
intelligence; sometimes reality itself imposes an information boundary. The framework identifies
logical, physical, and computational limits on knowledge, together with limits of detection and
interpretation, and it treats confirmation as a necessary condition for knowledge while recognizing
intrinsic limits on what can be verified. Two principles follow, and holding them together prevents
a large class of errors:
• A fact can exist without there being any possible observer capable of knowing it.
• A highly confident belief can exist without the corresponding fact being true.
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4. Epistemic limits do not imply ontological vagueness
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Suppose an event occurs and leaves no surviving detectable trace. Two very different claims are then
available: “We do not know whether X happened,” and “There is no fact of the matter about whether X
happened.” The signal-based framework supports keeping these apart, because it ties knowledge to
signals, detection, and inference while allowing that some truths remain permanently inaccessible.
The boundary of knowledge is not necessarily the boundary of reality.
This safeguard cuts in both directions. It blocks the inference “I cannot detect X, therefore X does
not exist,” and it equally blocks “X could exist, therefore I am justified in believing X exists.”
It also shows that ignorance comes in kinds, not merely degrees. Three epistemic conditions should
be distinguished:
• Known: sufficient accessible evidence exists.
• Currently unknown: the evidence might become available.
• Structurally unknowable: the necessary information can never reach the relevant observer or
system.
A person who does not know something because they have not looked is in a different condition from a
person who cannot know it because no possible signal could reach them. Ignorance can be temporary,
permanent, or principled.
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5. One reality, many information channels
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Different observers possess different information because they differ in location, sensors, history,
computational capacity, causal access, and interpretive models. This does not require each observer
to inhabit a different reality. Observers can be differently connected to the same reality. The
resulting position is neither naive realism nor “everything is subjective”: it is one reality
accessed through many information channels. Disagreement between observers can then be explained by
differences in evidence, access, processing, or interpretation, without positing different
underlying worlds.
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6. Coherence versus contact
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The signal-based framework distinguishes internal coherence from external contact. Coherence shows
that a model hangs together; contact shows whether reality agrees with it. A perfectly coherent
model can still be wrong, because coherence is a property of the model alone, while contact requires
action and feedback from the world. The framework also characterizes good explanations as portable
“loop-packages”: structures that another mind can run, that preserve invariants, and that support
prediction and intervention.
On this view, knowing is not the possession of a complete picture of reality. It is the possession
of a representation that participates successfully in reality-directed loops of inference,
prediction, and action. Science is accordingly less like collecting photographs of the world and
more like building increasingly effective interfaces with it.
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7. Reality is intelligible because it exceeds our models
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If reality were identical to whatever model an observer currently held, there would be no difference
between discovering something and constructing it. Because reality exceeds every observer’s
representation of it, reality can surprise the observer. That excess is what makes error, discovery,
science, and learning possible.
A related ladder shows how much is assumed at each step from contact to identity:
causal access → information → representation → reconstruction → identity
Each arrow requires further conditions. One can detect a star without describing it fully, describe
it without reproducing it, and in principle reproduce the information in a brain without thereby
reproducing the person whose brain it was. Many conceptual mistakes consist in silently treating one
of these arrows as automatic.
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PART II. Causation, Time, and Becoming
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8. The present as the place where reality is generated
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CTGP holds that reality exists only at an advancing present boundary. Earlier states do not persist
as independently real regions of spacetime; their specific physical organizations cease to exist as
present realities, while their causal consequences continue to propagate through later structures.
Present systems therefore inherit transformed physical continuities, causal records, and distributed
consequences of prior states, not the earlier states themselves.
The present is accordingly not merely “the point whose coordinate happens to be now.” It does
ontological work: it is the generated edge of reality. A memory of yesterday exists now, but
yesterday does not thereby become present again. Radiation arriving from a distant event exists now,
but the distant configuration that emitted it does not. The present can contain causal inheritance
from what no longer exists without containing the earlier state itself.
The past and the future are therefore radically asymmetric. The past can leave effects without
continuing to exist as past; the future can be causally possible without already existing as a
realized state. Under CTGP the future is not merely unknown but genuinely ungenerated.
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9. What makes truths about the past true
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Presentism faces a well-known question: if the past does not exist, what makes statements about it
true? CTGP adopts a Lucretian answer (after Bigelow, 1996). The truthmaker for a past-tense truth is
the present world itself, which instantiates primitive past-tensed properties of the form having
been, at stage σ′, such that p. These properties belong to the present state as a whole and, once
acquired, are retained at every later stage.
Records play a different role. Records are categorical physical structures that carry evidence about
the past, and they can be degraded or erased. They are evidence, not truthmakers. Losing a record
therefore does not change what happened; it changes only what an embedded observer can come to know.
CTGP states the cost of this position openly: past-tensed properties do not supervene on the
present’s categorical physical configuration, since two present states could agree in every
categorical respect while differing in their pasts. This is the familiar objection that Lucretian
properties “cheat” (Sider).
The distinction matters because it separates two questions that are easy to run together. Whether
something happened is settled by the present world’s past-tensed profile. Whether anyone can
establish that it happened depends on surviving records and on the signals available to an observer.
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