Cosmological Continuity Presentism (CCP): A Generative Spacetime Ontology Compatible with General Relativity

Abstract

Cosmological Continuity Presentism (CCP) develops a presentist interpretation of relativistic spacetime in which reality exists only in the present while progressing through continuous causal-temporal evolution. Rather than treating spacetime as a completed four-dimensional block, CCP interprets reality as a continuously generated causal structure in which each present state emerges through lawful transformation of immediately preceding states and in turn contributes to the emergence of subsequent states. Earlier states no longer exist as independently real regions of spacetime, yet their causal consequences persist through ongoing physical continuity embodied in later matter-energy configurations, fields, structures, and information-bearing records. The framework introduces a generation parameter σ that, at the fundamental level, functions as a primitive pre-geometric generative ordering parameter. Only within the emergent geometric regime does σ admit representation as an effective scalar field whose gradient structure is calibrated by the local matter-energy distribution through a constrained variational formulation intended to leave the Einstein field equations unmodified. Whether the σ sector carries independent dynamical degrees of freedom is treated in the manuscript as an open technical question rather than a settled result. CCP employs a generated-domain formalism M(σ) as a mathematical representation of the causal history leading to the present state. M(σ) is not interpreted as an ontological accumulation of co-existing past stages but as a formal representation of the continuously evolving causal-temporal process through which reality progresses. Within this framework, earlier states persist neither as independently existing spacetime regions nor as preserved organizations. Instead, their causal consequences continue through lawful physical transformations constrained by conservation laws and symmetry principles. Present systems inherit transformed physical continuities, distributed consequences, and causal records originating in prior states. CCP therefore distinguishes between ontological persistence, which is restricted to present physical structures and their encoded causal records, and determinate historical truth, according to which past events remain true as events that occurred even when aspects of them are no longer physically recoverable. Present encodings function as partial physical persistence and evidential traces rather than as the total grounding of all truths about the past. The formal development employs globally hyperbolic foliation, causal-structure reconstruction theorems, ADM decomposition, and a constrained action principle to address compatibility with local Lorentz-invariant dynamics, diffeomorphism invariance, and the standard Einstein field equations. In the emergent geometric regime, the effective σ field possesses a timelike gradient whose structure is determined by the local matter distribution and gives rise to potentially observable cosmological signatures. CCP predicts a causal-skew parameter ε(σ) in cosmic microwave background multipole correlations, together with a dipole-modulated parity asymmetry whose angular form and orientation follow from the gradient structure of ∇μσ. The absolute amplitude is not presently derived from first principles. The framework further predicts that a preferred dipole-aligned orientation associated with the generation field should remain directionally stable across redshift slices in 21cm cosmological tomography, reflecting the role of neutral hydrogen as a distributed causal archive spanning cosmic history. CCP does not claim that standard ΛCDM cosmology or block-universe interpretations cannot accommodate similar asymmetries through particular initial conditions or dynamical histories; rather, CCP derives a specific dipole-aligned angular structure as a lawlike consequence of its spacetime-generation formalism. CCP further examines connections with quantum interpretations, causal-set growth approaches, causal reconstruction programs, and the phenomenology of temporal experience. It proposes that the asymmetry of temporal experience is naturally accommodated by an ontology in which reality progresses through a continuous generative flow whose present boundary advances along a timelike generation direction, while remaining agnostic regarding any unique theory of consciousness. By grounding temporal becoming in continuous causal-temporal evolution and the causal structure of relativistic spacetime, CCP offers an interpretive extension of general relativity that leaves local physical laws unmodified at presently tested precision, while introducing potentially falsifiable cosmological signatures associated with spacetime generation. The framework is structured to be capable of failing. A null result in the predicted angular pattern, an orientation that varies with redshift across independent 21cm slices, or a preferred-frame coupling exceeding existing Standard-Model-Extension bounds would each disfavour CCP on its own stated criteria. Supernova 1987A Under CCP What it shows, what it entails, and what it cannot select 0. Status of this section SN1987A is an illustration of Postulate 2 (Causal Continuity) and Postulate 4 (Persistence Through Causal Continuity and Records), and a consistency demonstration for the cosmological foliation of §9.2. It is not evidence for CCP over eternalism, and presenting it as a "smoking gun" concedes ground unnecessarily. Every fact about the event is equally derivable in a block-universe reading. CCP's discriminating claim remains the causal skew parameter ε(σ) and its predicted dipole-aligned angular structure. The supernova's job here is narrower and still worth doing: it shows that CCP's account of access to the past — never retrieval, only inheritance — is concretely instantiated in a case where the reconstruction is unusually clean. 1. The event, in CCP's tenses 1.1 Distant is not the same as spacelike Stated first, because every confusion in this section descends from conflating the two. The interval between two events is not classified by spatial distance alone. A signal that crosses between them disqualifies the pair from being spacelike, however far apart they are. So: Pair of events Interval Significance for CCP Collapse → photon detection (1987) null ordinary causal propagation Collapse → neutrino detection essentially null (ultrarelativistic, strictly timelike — neutrinos are massive) ordinary causal propagation Collapse → contemporaneous Earth-state spacelike requires a foliation to define "contemporaneous" 1987 detection → Earth now timelike ordinary causal succession The collapse sits on our past light cone. Reconstructing it from its messengers is ordinary causal inference, not access to a spacelike elsewhere — and nothing in that reconstruction bears on simultaneity. The one genuinely spacelike pair is row three, which by construction exchanges nothing with us. §4 is about row three and nothing else. 1.2 The event A blue supergiant in the Large Magellanic Cloud, roughly 168,000 light-years distant, underwent core collapse. The neutrino burst was detected on 23 February 1987; the optical signal followed within hours. The neutrino lead is a fact about emission, not propagation. Neutrinos decoupled from the collapsing core immediately and escaped; the shock required additional hours to traverse the envelope and break out of the photosphere. Both messengers then crossed 168,000 years of intervening space at (or indistinguishably near) c. Nothing outran anything. Under CCP the correct tensed description is: The collapse was generated at an earlier hypersurface Σ_σ′ and does not now exist. The emitted neutrino and photon fields were generated at every intervening stage, as present-state field configurations, in unbroken causal continuity. The 1987 detection was not the past arriving. It was a present-state detector interacting with a present-state field whose organization is a lawful transformation of the organization the source had when the source was present. There is no retrieval across time. There is only inheritance within the present. Note that none of this is a retrieval operation dressed up in tensed language. Each arrow in source state → radiation state → later radiation state → detector state relates two adjacent stages, and at every stage only the current state exists. The chain is long; it is nowhere non-local, and at no point does a photon carry a preserved fragment of 1987 forward as an existing past object. 2. The event's reality did not depend on being observed The independence claim survives intact and is CCP-consistent: the collapse was a generative stage of M(σ), not a fact constituted at detection. The messenger structure is the reason. Two channels, emitted under different source conditions, arrived in the order and with the separation that source physics dictates. An observation-constituted event would owe no such debt to stellar interior physics that allegedly never occurred. One caution on framing. "Distant events are not real until observed" is not a position any serious interpretation holds, and defeating it costs CCP nothing and buys it nothing. The live opponents are eternalism and the growing block, neither of which this argument touches. Keep the point; drop the victory lap. 3. What "cosmic receipts" may and may not mean The ledger metaphor is useful and slightly dangerous. Read loosely it implies a stored past — a repository holding earlier states in reserve — which is exactly the eternalist picture CCP rejects. The metaphor has to be paid for at the door. Under Postulate 4, a record is not a preserved earlier state. It is a presently existing physical organization whose structure is a lawful transformation of an earlier organization that no longer exists. Some consequences stay organized as records; others become distributed and