Persistent Present Determinism (PPD)

Persistent Present Determinism is the claim that reality is always and only a single, complete present state that deterministically updates into its successor, while “past” and “future” exist only as present representations (records, memories, models, expectations) inside the current state (see Term 9).

Book: Existential Logicism. Location in text: Chapter 5 (“Persistent Present Determinism (Pillar 4)”), including sections 5.1 through 5.11, and Appendix 5.12 (“Formal Derivation of Persistent Present Determinism”).

WHAT IT IS

Persistent Present Determinism (PPD) (see Term 9) is the system’s hard reset on what “time” is allowed to mean, once you refuse to let reality dissolve into either metaphysical nothingness or metaphysical fantasy. The core intuition is simple but sharp: whatever is real must be present. Not “present” as a feeling, and not “present” as a poetic idea. Present as ontology. Whatever exists is what exists now. Everything else is either an internal structure of the now, or it is nothing.

This immediately reframes “the past” and “the future.” Under PPD, the past is not a region that still exists somewhere, and the future is not a region waiting in advance. Past and future show up only as present structures that encode claims about other times: memory traces, records, physical scars, stored simulations, forecasts, plans, expectations, and counterfactual models. PPD does not deny that those structures exist. It denies that they point to a literally co-existing archive of past moments or a warehouse of future moments. They are present things carrying temporal content, not portals into other existing times.

The second half of PPD is determinism, but not the fatalistic version people usually argue about. The chapter draws a clean distinction between determinism and predestination. Even if the world evolves lawfully and deterministically, the future is not “already there” in any ontological sense, because it does not exist until it becomes present. The universe is framed as a live computation that generates the next state when it arrives, not a pre-shot film with all frames already sitting in storage. That distinction matters because it blocks a common rhetorical move: “If determinism is true, the future exists already.” PPD says that only follows if you smuggle in a block-universe ontology, and PPD rejects that move.

Finally, PPD is meant to be compatible with the system’s earlier constraints. It does not undo Epistemic Refutation Paradox (see Term 5). It assumes it. It also leans on Illusion of Nothingness (see Term 7) by treating “absolute nothingness” as incoherent. If reality cannot be empty, and if any talk about time must occur inside present occurrences, then the most conservative ontology is present-only reality with lawful update. That is the core of Pillar 4.

WHY IT MATTERS

PPD collapses a huge amount of fake metaphysical drama. If only the present exists, then the classic sci-fi paradoxes that depend on a still-existing past stop being deep problems and become category errors. “Going back” requires a real “back” to go to. PPD says there is none, which forces time-travel talk into a more honest form: reconstructing a past-like configuration now, inside the present, which preserves causal order rather than breaking it.

PPD also forces precision in determinism debates. People often treat determinism as if it implies a stored future that already exists, which then gets translated into existential despair or theological fatalism. PPD draws a boundary line: even if the present state lawfully yields the next, the future is not an already-existent object. “Determined” is not “already written.” This breaks a common rhetorical trick where someone tries to win a free-will argument by quietly switching from “lawful evolution” to “pre-existing future.”

PPD makes “history” and “knowledge of the past” epistemically honest. Under PPD, every claim about the past is supported by present structures: records, memories, physical traces, and models. That does not make history subjective, and it does not make evidence meaningless. It makes the location of evidence explicit. You do not access the past itself. You access present traces and infer.

PPD also protects causal thinking from being explained away. The chapter treats “time is an illusion” moves as costly because they often try to dismiss the lived structure of causation and change rather than explain it. PPD takes causation seriously by treating becoming as real, not as an illusion painted on top of a frozen geometry.

Finally, PPD sets up later ethical and agency work. If the present is the only point of reality, then moral agency, responsibility, and correction live in the only place anything can live. This is not a motivational slogan. It is a structural consequence of the ontology. Whatever you want to change or value must exist as part of a present state, because nothing else exists to be targeted.

FORMAL SPINE

PPD has a formal appendix, and the appendix states the thesis as twofold. Ontologically, there is exactly one present configuration, and it exhausts what exists at that stage. Dynamically, the evolution from present to present is deterministic in the sense that the actual continuation is unique, even if agents represent multiple candidate continuations in models.

Definition 5.1 (Occurrence) is the baseline: an occurrence is any event, process, or state-change. This is the same existential floor used earlier in the system, and it keeps the time thesis anchored to actual ontology rather than to feelings about time.

Definition 5.2 (Present State) introduces the formal object that carries PPD: a present state S is a “maximal set of occurrences that are co-realized in the now.” The appendix treats the present state as a total configuration, not a partial snapshot.

Definition 5.3 (Present State Realizing Reality) then makes the ontology explicit with a schematic condition: WPPD iff ∃S ( S(S) ∧ ∀x (Occ(x) ↔ x ∈ S) ). Read in plain language: in a PPD reality, everything that exists now is in S, and nothing exists now outside S. This rejects a split ontology where past and future are equally real regions.

Definition 5.4 (Past/Future Representation) handles “past” and “future” without granting them independent being. A temporal representation is an occurrence r with Occ(r) whose content(r) is a proposition about a non-present time. The appendix writes RepPast(r) or RepFuture(r) when that content is about past or future, respectively.

Lemma 5.1 (Past and future are only presently given) is the closure result: any epistemically accessible fact an agent treats as about the past or future is realized as a present occurrence contained in the unique present state. The proof sketch is intentionally direct. If you “take a past fact as a fact now,” there must be a present cognitive or physical structure that realizes that stance. So “access to other times” is mediated by present configuration, not by direct inspection of co-existing time regions.

Definition 5.5 (Finite Present State) and Lemma 5.2 (No actually infinite present) add a finiteness constraint: each present state is finite, which blocks an ontology that sneaks in an infinite completed totality as “the present.”

Definition 5.7 (Law of Evolution F) and Definition 5.8 (Deterministic Update Rule) then formalize the dynamics. F maps a present state to a set of candidate successor states, and Next(S) selects the unique actual successor. The determinism condition is spelled as uniqueness: Next(S) is in F(S), and there is not more than one distinct candidate in F(S) that could be the actual successor.

Lemma 5.3 (No Unresolved Branching) blocks a metaphysics where multiple distinct futures are simultaneously actual. Branching can exist as representation or as “candidate successors,” but not as multiple co-realized actual continuations.

Theorem 5.4 (Persistent Present Determinism) packages the core claim: there exists a sequence {S0, S1, S2, …} of present states such that each Sn is the unique present state at stage n, and Sn+1 = Next(Sn) for all n. Any “other” elements of F(Sn) remain non-actual and function only as counterfactuals or epistemic possibilities. The theorem is basically saying: one present, one actual continuation, forever.

Remark 5.9 (Compatibilist Free Will) clarifies how agency is allowed to exist in a deterministic present. If an agent’s deliberations and choice are part of the present state, then they are among the causes that generate the next state. Choice does not require a break in lawfulness. It requires that the agent’s internal structure is causally efficacious within the lawful update.

Remark 5.10 (Probabilities as Epistemic Structures) makes the system’s view of chance explicit. In a deterministic present-only world, probabilities live in models, not in reality’s ontology. They represent incomplete knowledge of the present state and the laws, not a literally indeterminate future that exists in advance as multiple actual branches.

HOW IT WORKS

PPD begins by refusing to treat “past” and “future” as places. If you want to claim the past exists, you need to say what it means for a past moment to exist right now. PPD’s answer is: it does not, not as a co-existing slice. What exists are present occurrences that encode claims about earlier states. Memory and record are real, but they are real now.

Then it makes the same move about the future. Plans, forecasts, fears, predictions, and simulations are real now as present structures. What PPD denies is that these structures refer to an already-existing future. On this view, the future is what the world becomes, not a region sitting there.

Once you accept “one present state exhausts what exists,” you can formalize dynamics as a mapping from present to present. That forces a question: is the actual next present unique, or is reality literally branching into multiple co-realized presents? PPD chooses uniqueness for actuality. Branching is permitted as representation inside the present, not as multiple actual realities.

From there, the determinism debate changes shape. Determinism becomes a claim about the update rule, not a claim about a prewritten future. The present state yields the next state lawfully. That is all. There is no stored stack of future frames. The only “place” the future exists is as a present representation, and representations do not count as the future itself.

Finally, PPD uses this structure to demystify probability and “openness.” The future can be open in an epistemic sense even if it is ontologically single. You may not know which successor state will occur, but that does not imply multiple actual successors exist. The openness belongs to the agent’s knowledge situation, not to the ontology of time.

COMMON OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES

Objection: “This is just presentism, and relativity undermines a universal present.”
Reply: PPD does not require a single global cosmic clock shared by every observer. The chapter argues that relativity complicates simultaneity conventions, but it does not force the conclusion that past and future are equally real. PPD treats the block universe as an interpretation, not a compulsory metaphysical reading of the equations, and points to ongoing debate within physics about whether becoming is real.

Objection: “If the past does not exist, then history is fictional and evidence is meaningless.”
Reply: PPD does not say the past never happened. It says the past is not a co-existing region you can visit. History remains anchored in present occurrences: records, fossils, memories, physical traces. Evidence becomes more explicit, not less meaningful, because you stop pretending you have direct access to a vanished region and instead track the present structures that carry historical content.

Objection: “If the world is deterministic, then free will is impossible.”
Reply: That objection usually sneaks in predestination, the idea that future outcomes exist already. PPD rejects that ontology. In the appendix’s compatibilist remark, free will is treated as causal efficacy of the agent’s internal structure within the present state. Your deliberation is not outside causation. It is part of it. Determinism means the process is lawful, not that agency is illusory.

Objection: “Quantum physics implies fundamental randomness or branching, so PPD is false.”
Reply: PPD’s formal claim is about the ontology of actuality at a stage: one present state, one actual continuation. It allows many candidate successors as modeled possibilities. The probabilistic language is treated as epistemic. If you want to turn probabilistic formalisms into multiple co-realized actual futures, you are making a metaphysical move beyond the formalism, and PPD rejects that extra step.

Objection: “Time travel could exist via closed timelike curves, so the past could be accessible.”
Reply: The chapter’s point is not that exotic solutions never appear on paper. The point is that even if such loops were physically possible, they do not give you a freely accessible, living past to wander. The text frames nature as potentially enforcing the persistent present by preventing paradoxes, and it emphasizes that no evidence shows we can break the one-way flow or access anything but the present.

Objection: “This makes morality ‘just now,’ so guilt, responsibility, and repair lose meaning.”
Reply: PPD does the opposite. It locates responsibility in the only place it can exist: the present state where action happens. Past harm is real in the sense that it occurred and left present traces, present consequences, and present obligations. The fact that the harm is not a co-existing region does not erase its effects. It clarifies where repair can occur.

HOW TO USE IT IN DEBATE

Move Card: Separate determinism from predestination
Claim: Determinism does not imply a pre-existing future. Under PPD (see Term 9), the future does not exist until it becomes present.
If they say: “If the laws are deterministic, the future is already real.”
You respond: That only follows if you assume a block-universe ontology. PPD denies the warehouse-of-futures picture. The universe is framed as a live computation, not a pre-shot film.
What this forces: They must defend eternalism as an added metaphysical premise instead of treating it as a consequence of determinism.

Move Card: Collapse time-travel paradoxes
Claim: Time-travel paradoxes require the past to exist as a place you can enter. PPD rejects that, so the paradoxes are not deep contradictions, they are category errors.
If they say: “What about the grandfather paradox?”
You respond: In a present-only ontology, there is no actual “back in time” to go to. At most you reconstruct a past-like configuration now, which preserves causal order.
What this forces: They must admit their paradox depends on assuming co-existing past moments.

Move Card: Force epistemic honesty about history
Claim: Under PPD, every claim about the past is grounded in present structures like records and memory, not direct access to a vanished region.
If they say: “Then you can’t know anything about the past.”
You respond: You already never had direct access to the past. You had evidence. PPD just states that evidence is present occurrences with temporal content.
What this forces: They must stop acting like the past is an inspectable object and argue about evidence quality instead.

Move Card: Block “time is an illusion” handwaving
Claim: Explaining time away is not automatically a win. PPD treats causation and becoming as real and demands that science explain experience rather than delete it.
If they say: “Flow is just a psychological illusion.”
You respond: Then you owe an explanation for why causal structure and temporal asymmetry show up everywhere in experience and in scientific description, instead of labeling it illusion and walking away.
What this forces: They must pay the explanatory debt, not just assert “illusion” as a magic word.

Move Card: Reframe probability
Claim: In PPD, probabilities live in models, not in ontology. Multiple futures exist as represented candidates, not as co-realized actualities.
If they say: “Probability proves the future is open in reality.”
You respond: It can be open epistemically without being ontologically multiple. The appendix explicitly treats probabilities as epistemic structures over a single actual continuation.
What this forces: They must argue for ontic indeterminism rather than sliding from “I don’t know” to “reality branches.”

Move Card: Put agency inside the causal chain
Claim: PPD supports a compatibilist account where choice is a causally efficacious part of the present state, not a magical break from law.
If they say: “If causes determine outcomes, my choices don’t matter.”
You respond: Your choice is part of the cause-set. The question is not “are you outside causation,” it is “are you a causally relevant structure inside it.”
What this forces: They must either deny that agents are causal structures or accept that agency can be real under determinism.

CONNECTIONS TO OTHER PAGES

Connects backward to: Epistemic Refutation Paradox (see Term 5). PPD inherits ERP’s minimal realism, because PPD’s “present state” is still a set of occurrences, not a metaphysical void.

Connects backward to: Illusion of Nothingness (see Term 7). PPD’s present-only ontology is one of the system’s ways of preventing “nothingness” from being smuggled in as a real state behind time.

Connects backward to: Logical Elimination of Infinite Regress (see Term 8). LEIR constrains infinite explanatory chains. PPD constrains infinite time-regions by denying co-existing past and future as ontological domains.

Connects forward to: later work on agency and ethics in the system. PPD’s deterministic update plus present-only ontology is the pressure point that later arguments must answer when they talk about responsibility, meaning, and choice.

TERMINOLOGY INDEX FOR THIS PAGE

Term 1: Existential Logicism (EL)
Term 4: Seven Pillars of Existential Logicism
Term 5: Epistemic Refutation Paradox (ERP)
Term 7: Illusion of Nothingness (ION)
Term 8: Logical Elimination of Infinite Regress (LEIR)
Term 9: Persistent Present Determinism (PPD)
Term 14: Occurrence (Occ(x))
Term 15: Reality (R)