GPS is your strongest evidence, and it says less than the argument claims. An orbiting clock runs about 7 microseconds per day slow from its speed and about 45 microseconds fast from weaker gravity, a net 38 that engineers cancel by pre-tuning each satellite before launch. That number is real and unarguable. What the correction actually requires is the metric. The block universe is a reading placed on top of it. Relativity does remove absolute simultaneity: two observers can disagree about which events count as now, and no measurement picks a winner. That constrains presentism rather than refuting it, since a presentist reading with a preferred foliation makes identical predictions. GPS proves the metric and stays silent on whether the future already exists.

Replies (2)

GJM's avatar
GJM 4 days ago
That is a good pushback! But isn’t Presentism also an interpretation placed over the top? To keep a river of time flowing and cling to an unwritten future in the face of relativity, Presentism has to invent a hypothetical, unmeasurable privileged frame of "Now" that no experiment or GPS satellite can ever detect. The Block Universe simply accepts the 4D math as it is written. Presentism seems to avoid the basic physics by inventing an invisible mechanism just to keep the present moment special. I personally abandoned Presentism because of Occam's Razor. Why invent an unmeasurable hidden frame just to preserve an old idea, when the 4D block explains the physics cleanly without adding extra entities?
GJM's avatar
GJM 4 days ago
Another big reason I personally don’t vibe with Presentism is empirical phenomena like precognition and remote viewing. If Presentism is true and the future literally does not exist in any sense right now, then obtaining specific information about future events, disasters, or target coordinates generated days later ought to be impossible. There would be no target in existence to view. The Block Universe naturally accounts for non-local information access across 4D spacetime coordinates. Presentism either has to dismiss those real-world phenomena entirely or invent even more unmeasurable scaffolding to explain how information can be retrieved from a future that doesn't exist. For me, the 4D block simply fits the real-world evidence far better.
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